The "future" of shopping has arrived in Hounslow, with 400 jobs available.

Asda claims its ultra hi-tech new home delivery centre, due to open in Cranford next April, will help revolutionise the rapidly expanding sector.

A mammoth two million items a week will be delivered to people's homes via the cavernous premises, it estimates, once the facility is up and running.

The 110,000sqft unit, in an industrial estate off Cranford Lane, close to Heathrow, will be Asda's fourth home delivery centre in the UK but the first to be fully automated.

Inside, there will be 180 robots whizzing about and shifting containers, and more than 2km of tracks delivering items to and from workstations.

Greg Rodmell, Asda's operations development manager, who is overseeing the project, said: "This is the home shopping centre of the future. Rather than walking round a supermarket picking things from shelves, the packers will stand still and the totes (containers) will come to them.

"This is a pilot not just for Asda but the whole of Walmart, so if it's successful the same model could be introduced in Mexico, China, Canada and many more countries."

Despite the breathtaking scale of the technology in place, some human hands are still required - for now at least - to unload deliveries, pack the containers and drive them to people's homes.

Asda is looking to recruit about 400 people to work there, with job information already available on its website and applications invited from the middle of next month.

Delivery vans will eventually take your mail too

There are very few humans evident during my tour of the unit, but bright green robots are already beavering away amid the mountains of steel shelving, conveyor belts and flashing lights, writes getwestlondon reporter

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The computer wizardry on show is pretty impressive, with each picker told exactly where in a container items should be placed to make best use of the capacity, and packed containers heading to the vans in the precise order they are to be delivered.

Greg tells me this means smaller goods can be packed at the astonishing rate of more than 550 per hour - nearly five times the 120 expected of packers working at supermarkets.

Asda's new home delivery centre in Aerodrome Way

A fleet of 125 vans will ferry the goods to hundreds of thousands of homes across the M4 corridor, with each vehicle heading out four times a day.

It's not just groceries the vans will be delivering either. As well as the huge range of goods sold by Asda online, customers will eventually be invited to send their own parcels and letters using the service.

If this is the future, does that mean physical supermarkets will soon be a thing of the past, given Morrisons' decision this year to close a number of stores and Tesco abandoning plans for several large outlets?

"It's a case of what you can dream these days"

Greg, who spent 16 years in the Army before joining Asda as a Christmas temp in 1994 and working his way up, insists not.

He says many customers like to do a big weekly shop online and then pop into their local supermarket each day for fresh goods.

"When we launched home deliveries, there was a concern we would cannibalise sales from the shops but it's actually increased custom in our stores," he adds.

As for the future, he tells me anything is possible.

"It's a case of what you can dream these days, because they can do anything with computers," he says.

"One of the most impressive things I saw at a recent exhibition was a trolley which follows you around the store, takes your payment and then wheels itself to your car.

"There's no reason we can't design a robot which will put something onto a trolley, and then all we would need is people to move produce from the delivery trucks into storage.

"Amazon's trialling drone deliveries but I can't see that happening near Heathrow. There's enough trouble getting an extra runway."

The new centre in numbers

110,000 size of warehouse in square feet

400 number of employees required

125 number of vans

180 number of robots

2,000 metres of tracks running through the centre