Ocado joins forces with autonomous vehicle software company Oxbotica

Ocado Group, an online grocery platform and solutions provider, has entered into a partnership with UK-based autonomous vehicle software company Oxbotica.

The partnership will facilitate collaboration on hardware and software interfaces for autonomous vehicles to improve and integrate the autonomy software platform of Oxbotica into a range of vehicles.

The vehicles include those that operate inside Ocado’s customer fulfillment center buildings and the surrounding yard areas, vehicles used for last-mile deliveries and kerb-to-kitchen robots, among others.

The multi-year collaboration’s objective will be to enable the partners of Ocado to use the Ocado Smart Platform for cutting down the costs of last-mile delivery and other logistics operations.

Alex Harvey – Chief of Advanced Technology at Ocado said: “We are excited about the opportunity to work with Oxbotica to develop a wide range of autonomous solutions that truly have the potential to transform both our and our partners’ CFC and service delivery operations, while also giving all end customers the widest range of options and flexibility.”

Ocado has also announced an investment of £10m in Oxbotica as part of the latter’s Series B funding round. The financing round was led by bp ventures.

As part of the partnership, the online grocery platform and solutions provider will outfit a subset of its delivery vans and warehouse vehicles equipped with data capture capabilities, which could have video cameras, RADAR, LiDAR, and other sensing devices.

Ocado will make the data available to Oxbotica for training and testing its technologies, which will then inform the former about the opportunities available and where best it could take advantage of new partnerships.

Paul Newman – Co-Founder and CTO of Oxbotica said: “This is an excellent opportunity for Oxbotica and Ocado to strengthen our partnership, sharing our vision for the future of autonomy.

“By combining both companies’ cutting-edge knowledge and resources, we hope to bring our Universal Autonomy vision to life and continue to solve some of the world’s most complex autonomy challenges.”