European online-only grocery retailer, Ocado, has developed 4G-based protocols to communicate with thousands of robots powering its new automated warehouses.

The UK-based company, which claims over 500,000 active customers shopping with it, says its highly-automated warehouses will be offered as part of a managed service called the Ocado Smart Platform which enables international partners to build “scalable, sustainable and profitable online retail businesses”.

Ocado claims the protocol marks the first deployment anywhere in the world to use the unlicensed 4G spectrum for warehouse automation and “guarantees a connection 10 times per second to each of the 1,000+ robots roaming around the warehouse – all working within a 150-metre radius”.

Adam Green, wireless team leader at Ocado, says that “while building a robot can be a relatively straightforward task, creating a swarm of thousands of robots and making sure you can communicate with every single in a tenth of a second is a whole different ball game”.

“We have worked closely with Cambridge Consultants to develop an innovative system that takes advantage of modern wireless communications principles but has secret ingredients that tailor it to our specific environment.

“Since the protocol works in the licence-free spectrum, we can also deploy it at a moment's notice in any location around the world.”

Green says the wireless protocol can be repurposed for other IoT applications that mandate reduced communications delay between many devices, including with vehicle-to-vehicle connectivity for smart cars, air traffic control systems or large scale industrial systems.