Ocado partners with Oxbotica to develop new autonomous fleet

One the 15th of April 2021, the online grocery platform Ocado made an announcement regarding a deal with Oxford-based start up Oxbotica to develop a range of autonomous vehicles. The company has invested $13.8 million which is equivalent to nearly £10 million and bought stakes in the start up that develops these new autonomous vehicles

This large investment from Ocado is a part of Oxbotica’s latest series B equity funding round which was led by BP ventures and included many other strategic and financial investors in the US, the UK, China and Australia. As part of the investment, Ocado will provide a small fleet of their own delivery vans and warehouse vehicles that are also fitted with video cameras and a multitude of sensing devices.

The relationship between Ocado and Oxbotica isn’t anything new as four years ago, both companies conducted a two-week trial using an early prototype delivery vehicle carrying out autonomous deliveries in Greenwich. Since the initial trial, Oxbotica made a lot of good progress in developing its platform and now, there’s an even broader partnership including both Ocado’s financial investment and a commercial collaboration agreement.

This partnership is mainly to collaborate on both hardware and software interfaces for AI-powered, autonomous vehicles, thereby integrating and enhancing Oxbotica’s autonomy software platform into a slew of vehicles. The use cases range from vehicles within and around its packing warehouses through to the last-mile vehicles that deliver grocery orders to people’s homes. As a result of the multi-year collaboration, Oxbotica can use the Ocado Smart Platform to reduce the cost of last-mile delivery and other logistics operations.

The Chief of Advanced Technology at Ocado and the Co-Founder & CTO of Oxbotica have shown enthusiasms in regards to the partnership but are you excited to see more from this collaboration? When do you think we will see these brand new autonomous vehicles? Let us know what you think!