Ocado unveiled the first prototype of its €7m ($8.5m) SecondHands robot — a humanoid robot designed to help maintenance technicians keep the automated machinery that sorts out customer orders working.

Ocado said it worked in collaboration with four European universities, including Switzerland's EPFL to create a robotic assistant with a high level of human robot interaction and superhuman strength.

The hardware and dialogue system were developed in the lab of Tamim Asfour at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. The robot's vision system comes from Sapienza University in Rome and University College London.

The work was part of an EU-funded project, called Horizon 2020, to develop collaborative robots that can safely work alongside humans.

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