Walmart Tests Shelf-Scanning Robots In Over 50 Stores (engadget.com)

Walmart is expanding a shelf-scanning robot trial to 50 additional stores, including some in its home state of Arkansas. "Machines from Bossa Nova Robotics will roam the aisles to check for stock levels, pricing and misplaced items, saving human staffers the hassle of checking everything themselves," reports Engadget. The robots will be fully autonomous, though technicians will be available in case things go awry. They employ 3D imaging to dodge obstacles and make notes to return later if their path is completely blocked. From the report: Walmart stresses that the robots are there to supplement humans, not replace them -- to eliminate drudgery and the expenses that go with it. This helps workers get to the task of filling empty shelves, and that's a job that the company doesn't see ending any time soon given the difficulty robots still have when grabbing objects. "Store associates will always be better at that," Walmart's Martin Hitch told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. And the chief of Bossa Nova rival Simbe Robotics, Brad Bogolea, added that shelf checks can cost a major retailer hundreds of millions of dollars per year. However expensive the robots may be, they could pay for themselves very quickly. Whether or not the robots see wider use will, unsurprisingly, hinge on the success of this wider trial. Walmart posted a video about the shelf-scanning robots on its YouTube page.

Comments

Re: Dumb, expensive and overly complicated

[FatdogHaiku]

A relative of mine was head of IT for a vendor that served Walmart (and most major food retailers) and I was impressed by how he could check stock at ANY Walmart via a vendors app. Their system for inventory and ordering seemed pretty much on the ball. We actually checked a stores numbers and then visited the store to confirm and they were for the most part spot on for, say, units in the freezers. Back room I don't know about but they had never had an issue with out of stock where the home office didn't get alerts to ship more product to a warehouse. They also tracked expiration dates, as this was perishable food stuffs. I would hope that since they were doing all that already (this was 6 years ago) then any integrating of low stock warnings into the existing system would be axiomatic...
but then, they might be fudging their sales numbers...

Fine with me, and I work in retail

[RubberDogBone]

Since I haven't found a job in my former and varied IT field, I am currently working in a retail store. It's as bad as they say but it beats unemployment.

One of my duties is identifying where we need to restock. It's a major PIA and takes a long time. In theory, we know what we had at last inventory and we know what we have sold, and this should tell us what we need to restock. And our district warehouse tries to send us what we need to keep pace with sales.

BUT this doesn't help us with products picked up from one shelf and put down somewhere else, or tell us anything about pilfered items. We recently discovered one of our shelves HAS been nearly entirely stolen, because we haven't sold much from that area. We do check it but we have a whole store to check. So nobody noticed everything was vanishing until I blew the whistle a few days ago. All that did was make my boss mad at me for finding it. Like it was my fault.

We have a huge problem in my store of not having items inventory says we should have. It's so bad, customers calling to see if we have something generally ask us to go put hands on it.

So it would be amazing if a robot could come into our store even once a week and do as much checking as possible. We workers would rather have a list of stuff to go fetch and move back to proper locations than trying to do both the find part and replace part. We would also LOVE having an idea of what we need to restock. We don't like not having stuff to sell.