Amazon and Walmart have been using robots in warehouses for inventory management since years, but none of those devices were deployed at the stores yet. Enter retail service robots and they are meant to do just that by:
- roaming through grocery-store aisles to check for spill-overs from any packaged items.
- alerting store staff of incorrect or missing pricing labels from sale-able items.
- scanning shelves to see which products are missing to request for restocking.
- browsing through every corner of store to report potential hazards for clean-up.
An example of this is a google-eyed robot called Marty (shown in the enclosed image) who is intentionally built to be taller than the tallest shelf in a store. Marty and his other friends have already been deployed in more than 1000 stores across the world. Since then, some shoppers have been complaining about being “watched over” by these robots since they were initially not programmed to overtake shoppers browsing items in aisles of stores. However, with the recent upgrades they are now learning to make way for humans!
This content was originally published for my TechTuesday’s initiative on LinkedIn.
