Quick, what’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word robot? It’s likely anything from a walking, talking C-3PO-like bipod to a wheeled cylinder-like R2D2 to an unstable computer like HAL 9000. The truth is, just about anything mechanized that can pull off human actions can be considered a robot. It doesn’t need to look like a human, either. Because robots don’t necessarily have to walk and talk or even think much, they can be deployed in many different ways, both consumer-facing and behind the scenes. The retail space is no exception. Social distancing and sanitization requirements over the past 14 months led to a surge in online ordering and a dearth of shoppers heading to the malls, which accelerated the use of certain types of robots in warehouses and brick-and-mortar stores. Some of those trends are here to stay, others not so much. Here’s a rundown of significant technologies and trends in the retail robots space.
“The general trend is that we’re seeing more robots in retail stores,” says John Harmon, senior analyst at Coresight Research. “That’s picked up quite a bit during the pandemic. The major applications tend to be among mass merchandisers and grocery stores.” Lowe’s may have had its LoweBot roaming the aisles answering shopper questions as far back as 2016, and Best Buy still has mechanized kiosks in airports and other public spaces across the country, but most of the in-store robots operating today are to be found in grocery stores or big-box stores that sell groceries. And on that front, Harmon says, “Walmart is the leader.”
Since 2018, Walmart has used robotic floor scrubbers at many of its brick-and-mortar locations and continues to expand its in-store robotics initiatives at its Sam’s Club subsidiary, with some clever iterations. The 372 new Tennant T7 AMR floor scrubbers that the warehouse club recently deployed to its retail locations will soon also have AI-enabled scanners that check for out-of-stock or misshelved items, as well as gather inventory data, mounted on top of them. It’s an ingenious hack that gives new meaning to the concept of multitasking. In January, Walmart announced that it would be expanding its use of market fulfillment centers (MFC), essentially mini-warehouses attached to or inside of brick and mortar stores that contain thousands of products including groceries and consumer electronics. Purchased items are retrieved by a mix of humans and robots and then placed on a table, where humans put orders together for pickup by customers. The system has been in place at a Walmart in Salem, NH since 2019. In other countries, some big-box and warehouse clubs have deployed robots. For example, French big-box chain Carrefour’s stores in the United Arab Emirates are using Simbe Robotics’s “Tally,” a tall pillar-like robot on wheels that uses computer vision-powered cameras to scan store shelves for items that are out of stock, misshelved, or mispriced. It’s then able to alert human stockers, who can surgically correct any errors or restock shelves without having to find these issues themselves. Tally’s built-in AI software also develops insight over time around what products are selling out and correlates that with other data such as discounts, weather, dates, and the like, allowing for better inventory and supply chain management; imagine if Tally robots had been more widespread during the shortages of toilet paper, sanitizer, flour, and other staples during the first months of COVID quarantine in 2020 read more...
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