He’s made by Badger Technologies and only one of five robotic systems currently in place in grocery stores throughout the U.S. He checks inventory, alerts staff to spills on the floors and directs customers to various store locations. As of April 2020, 172 Giant Stores and 325 Stop and Shops have used Marty who, by the way, speaks both English and Spanish. Another is Tally made by Simbe Robotics who performs similar functions and employees can get data from the robot every 30 minutes.
Then there’s Alphabot from Alert Innovation who speeds up the fulfillment of online orders with a unique picking skill and utilizes a human worker for finalization. Walmart reported that Alphabot currently assists with 20% of its online grocery orders. In Woolworths, Australia, you’ll find Millie, similar in many ways to Marty except that Millie will actually clean up the spills.
Finally, we have SmartSight EMA50, the supermarket robot that assists with inventory management. It uses machine learning and computer vision to spot low stocks and pricing errors and they claim it reduces inventory time by 65%!
SmartSight EMA50
Check out the shopping carts in China at 7-Fresh
In the Chinese grocery store 7-Fresh, their robots double as shopping carts! First the customer must download the app and scan a QR code located on the robotic cart. This allows the cart to move autonomously and follow a person around the store, scanning items that are placed in the cart. When they are ready to check out, they pay with facial recognition.
Over to Tokyo where an exciting twist to Robotics is taking place.
It has a boomerang-shaped head with its eyes spaced widely apart, strange looking hands that can grab things with suction cupped thumbs and big shoulders to aid in shifting movements as it works tirelessly behind the scenes on your behalf.
Humanoid Bot in Tokyo
You won’t be able to see this humanoid robot when you enter the Family Mart or Lawsons convenience store in Tokyo. It’s hard at work in the back stockroom ensuring that the shelves are stocked so that products are readily available for purchase, and this is only one of the many daily tasks that it performs.
But there is something uniquely different about this bot…and that is how it takes its orders. It is controlled remotely by someone working in a different location in Tokyo, maybe miles away wearing a virtual-reality headset. This particular robot (there are only a few working outside company labs at present) was built by Telexistence, a Tokyo-based startup whose mission is to “make robotics exponentially more relevant” and “to enable a person to do any job on earth from anywhere else.”
This type of technology is known as telepresence and broadly speaking it allows someone to interact with people or things in a different place just as if they were there. They might be controlling drones remotely or acting as an instructor in a different country…without time or distance restrictions.
The humanoid test bot in Lawson’s isn’t perfect yet, by any means. You or I could probably stock the shelves faster than the bot right now…but give it some time. Eventually all the necessary training data from this robot will be used to train AI (artificial intelligence) to take over some of the tasks.
What does it all mean for jobs in the future? Well, let’s be thankful that all activities are not done by remote control and that human presence is still required. Sure, there are not as many people needed in an Amazon Go store these days with cashierless checkout…but someone has to design and manufacture the systems.
There is much R&D still needed to perfect such robotic applications and in most cases it’s still in the early stages…but it appears everyone is eager and open to the potential value of using bots in the future. It’s just one of the many things that continues to make the food business exciting.
