- Within a decade after Sam Walton founded Walmart in 1962,
the company started acquiring a well deserved reputation
as the most responsive and most efficient retailer
in the United States.
Walmart's larger and more tailored product mix,
as well as lower prices,
were the most direct cause behind the decimation
of old stalwarts, such as Sears,
Montgomery Ward, and K-Mart.
Over the last two decades however,
Amazon has proved to be not just Walmart's match,
but by doing away with the cost
of physical stores altogether, even more efficient.
After initial struggles in figuring out how to fight back,
Walmart has now emerged as perhaps the most nimble
traditional retailer in the world.
There are two major parts to Walmart's strategy
for competing with Amazon.
After acquiring Jet.com in the US,
Flipcart in India,
as well as other Etailers,
it is going head to head against Amazon in online commerce.
Equally importantly, Walmart is turning to technology
to make its physical stores even more efficient.
An army of robots is playing
an important role in this effort.
Having learned from several well-designed experiments,
Walmart is now in a process of deploying thousands of robots
in a large number of its over 11 thousand stores.
Some of these robots perform backroom operations
such as unloading trucks and then scanning boxes.
This is where Walmart made its early moves
in bringing robots to the stores.
Others are pickup towers, where consumers
can pick up goods ordered online.
More recently, however, robots have started
roaming the aisles, scrubbing floors
or tracking shelf inventory.
The robots that track shelf inventory
have proved to be particularly interesting.
They're made by Bossa Nova Robotics, a tech startup
founded by Carnegie Mellon engineers in Pittsburgh.
Their job is to roam the aisles, tracking shelf inventory
and conveying that information to people
in the store's backroom, on a realtime basis,
a significantly faster and more subtle approach
than relying on human workers.
Some estimates suggest that empty shops can cost a retailer
as much as one percent of revenue,
a huge abound in an industry
that operates on razor thin margins.
Should these robots appear humanoid?
The company's answer, no.
They need to look industrial.
You don't want to scare people.
Unlike floor scrubbers, shelf tracking robots
need to be tall enough to scan
all of the shelves from top to bottom.
As a result, would they improve intimidating to shoppers?
Bossa Nova's solution, make the main unit short and squat
but attach a tall arm with cameras to it.
How would people react to them?
Bossa Nova as well as Walmart discovered
that after initial curiosity,
customers basically ignored them.
What about store associates?
Since it's people who must fill the empty shelves,
associates started seeing them largely as coworkers
and have even given them human names.
The biggest surprise, teenage customers.
They tend to be naughty.
Some try to push them around, others may try to sit on them.
Bossa Nova has had to make sure that the robots
can withstand possible abuse without breaking down
or hurting the naughty shoppers.
There are some other questions
to which the company's still in the process
of figuring out their best answers.
Should the robots have turn signals,
should they beep if they want to reverse?
Should these features follow the design of cars
or be totally different?
As robots and humans start to cohabit the same spaces
and operate in ever closer proximity,
questions such as these are beginning to pose
important questions regarding the design of robots.