Ocado's fruit-picking robot sparks job fears

Ocado showed off a robotic hand at its warehouse in Andover, Hampshire, yesterday and in the process, prompted fresh fears of a job-killing technological revolution.

The fruit and vegetable-picking hand is part of a five-year EU-funded research collaboration called "Soma" (Soft Manipulation), carried out between Ocado, five European universities and Disney's research arm, says the BBC.

The online supermarket already uses robots in its warehouse to select boxes of fruits or vegetables for customer orders, although the end products are then "picked" by humans.

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It has proved difficult in the past to develop an automated process that can pick delicate fruit and vegetables without causing damage. However, Ocado's air-pressure gripper can now do just that.

"At the moment, only the gripper is being demonstrated but ultimately the robot will learn to distinguish fruit ripeness through machine learning," says the BBC.

"It will also be able to pick other items which require different care - such as wine bottles and detergent."

The Guardian says the "development will fuel fears about jobs being replaced by technology", as automation threatens to end the need for swaths of blue and even white-collar roles across the economy.

Some experts are optimistic improvements in productivity will boost economic growth to the extent that higher jobless figures will not matter. There are also advocates for a universal income to ensure inequality does not rise.

But Ocado, which says the robots have already boosted productivity by 50 per cent in the factory, says it is adding, not cutting, jobs.

Alex Voica from Ocado’s technology arm, said: "Right now, we are limited by the capability of the warehouse and by the productivity of humans."

Duncan Tatton-Brown, Ocado’s finance director, added: "We are not only creating more operational jobs, but creating a lot more jobs for software and hardware engineers."

In addition to the fruit-picker, Ocado is working to develop a robot maintenance engineer called SecondHands.

The company "currently has 50 innovations seeking a patent" and is seeking to "persuade international retailers to use its software and technology". It took on more than 200 extra tech experts last year.

Overall, Ocado's profits rose 22 per cent to £14.5m in 2016, while sales rose by close to 14 per cent to £1.3bn.