November/December 2020

n NEWS November/December 2020 www.drivesncontrols.com 12 THE BRITISHONLINEsupermarket and technology group Ocado is buying two North American robotics companies – Kindred Systems and Haddington Dynamics – for a total of $287m to enhance its robotic manipulation capabilities and to accelerate the delivery of robotic picking technologies to its customers. Ocado has also acquired a minority stake in materials-handling robotics start-up called Myrmex, which has operations in the US and Greece. In a separate development, Ocado is facing legal action from AutoStore Technology, a Norwegian manufacturer of automated storage and retrieval systems, which accuses Ocado of infringing some of its patents, and is seeking to block Ocado’s expansion in the UK and the US. It is also demanding monetary damages. A complaint filed by AutoStore with the US International Trade Commission, also names one of Ocado’s suppliers, the Hampshire-based motor manufacturer Printed Motor Works, as a respondent. Ocado is paying $262m for Kindred Systems, based in San Francisco and Toronto, which designs and supplies piece-picking robots for e-commerce and order fulfilment duties. Founded in 2014, Kindred was one of the first companies to use deep reinforcement learning to develop piece-picking robots with AI-powered vision and motion control. Kindred has around 90 employees, about half of whom are engineers. The company expects to have around 180 robots installed and operating by the end of this year, and to generate revenues of more than $35m in 2021. Its customers include the US clothing chains Gap and American Eagle. Ocado is paying $25m for Haddington Dynamics, an r&d company based in Las Vegas that specialises in designing andmanufacturing lightweight robotic arms that can be produced at a relatively low cost using 3D printing. Its customers include Nasa and DuPont. Myrmex, the start-up in which Ocado has taken a minority stake, has a portfolio that includes autonomous mobile robots and smart asset-handling systems. Myrmex focuses mainly on“the last mile”of delivery, with systems that can deliver click-and-collect orders“a few seconds”after a customer arrives at a pick-up point. When combined with Ocado’s expertise and technologies for robotic manipulation, Kindred and Haddington are expected to accelerate the commercialisation of robotic picking and other automation tasks for Ocada Smart Platform (OSP) customers.“We want to accelerate the development of our systems, including improving their speed, accuracy, product range and economics,”says Ocado CEO, Tim Steiner. Meanwhile, Ocado is facing legal action in the UK and the US from AutoStore, which alleges that the Ocado Smart Platform – an automated system using robots that travel across a grid to lift and move bins below – infringes patents covering its own system that it developed more than 20 years ago. These patents include the robots’in-wheel motors and the system for lifting and placing the bins. In 2012, Ocado became an AutoStore customer and the Norwegian company supplied hardware and software“in good faith” for Ocado to simulate and test. Since then, Ocado has filed patents for technologies under the names of its executives, including CEO Tim Steiner, that AutsoStore alleges were “in fact invented by AutoStore”. “Ocado took advantage of being our customer and having access to AutoStore’s market-leading technology and then attempted to assert ownership over what it had learned from AutoStore by filing its own patents,”says AutoStore CEO, Karl Johan Lier. “Our ownership of the technology at the heart of Ocado’s warehousing system is clear,” he adds.“We will not tolerate Ocado’s continued infringement of our intellectual property rights in its effort to boost its growth and attempt to transform itself into a global technology company.” AutoStore, founded in 1996, claims to have more than 500 installations of its technology with 18,000 robots operating in 30 countries, in markets ranging from groceries to aviation. Its customers include Asda in the UK and Lufthansa in Germany. Ocado, founded in 2000, has filed for more than 40 patents for its Ocado Smart Platform. As well as using the system for its own online supermarket operation, Ocado has also sold the technology to Marks & Spencer and Morrisons in the UK, and in 2018 signed a deal to supply the US supermarket chain Kroger with 20 automated distribution centres, the first of which is due to open in early 2021. Ocado says that a US investigation into the patent claims during the Covid-19 pandemic “could be deleterious to public health, safety and welfare in the US”. Ocado buys two robotics companies for $287m – and faces patent lawsuit A REPORT FROM the Nikkei news service in Japan suggests that Nidec is planning to build a $1.9bn factory in Serbia to produce motors for the European electric vehicle market. The company is said to be in the final stage of negotiations for the plant, which would include a research centre and could be producing up to 300,000 motors per year by 2023. Nidec, which has a goal of generating revenues worth $6.7–9.6bn from the automotive sector, is already planning to start producing EV motors in existing plants in France and Poland in 2022. It has a roadmap to produce a series of EV drivetrains with ratings from 50kW/1.6kNm to 200kW/4.2kNm. Nidec predicts that electric drivetrains will become less expensive than internal combustion engines by 2025, by which time it expects to be shipping around two million of its“e-axle”traction motors globally. The number will increase to about 10 million a year by 2030. Nidec is planning a $1.9bn EV motor plant for Serbia Autostore alleges that its Ocado has infringed patents protecting its automated, robot-based storage technology (above)