Shopping Carts from the Future
Two weeks ago the Sarah Nassauer of the Wall Street Journal reported that Walmart was ending it’s 5-year relationship with Bossa Nova Robotics whom provided robots that scanned the aisles of their physical stores in search of out of stocks as well as determining planogram compliance rates. The move shocked a number of analysts as Walmart had spent years touting the use of unassisted robots in their stores to help automate a number of labor-intensive tasks that significantly impacted the number of staff that they needed to employ at each store. The story goes on to state:
“Walmart ended the partnership because it found different, sometimes simpler solutions that proved just as useful, said people familiar with the situation. As more shoppers flock to online delivery and pickup because of Covid-19 concerns, Walmart has more workers walking the aisles frequently to collect online orders, gleaning new data on inventory problems, said some of these people. The retailer is pursuing ways to use those workers to monitor product amounts and locations, as well as other automation technology, according to the people familiar with the situation.
In addition, Walmart U.S. chief executive John Furner has concerns about how shoppers react to seeing a robot working in a store, said one of these people.
Walmart said in January that the Bossa Nova robots would be in around 1,000 of its 4,700 U.S. stores. Over the past two years the retailer has said it would bring more automation to stores, characterizing the machines as robot “sidekicks” for store workers akin to R2-D2 from the “Star Wars” movies. The Bossa Nova robots were in about 500 stores when the partnership ended, said a Walmart spokeswoman.
“We learned a lot about how technology can assist associates, make jobs easier and provide a better customer experience,” she said. “We will continue testing new technologies and investing in our own processes and apps to best understand and track our inventory and help move products to our shelves as quickly as we can.”’
The key to the statement seems to lie in the last sentence from the Walmart spokesperson; “…track our inventory and help move our products to our shelves as quickly as we can.” While Bossa was unquestionably conducting the first of the stated goals, it however did nothing to help solve the latter. The key may lie in news’ articles from 4 years ago when Walmart and Five Robotics announced that they were collaborating on a robotic shopping cart which, judging by some of the article titles from the press, was a bit ahead of its time. Fast forward two years later and a patent was issued to Walmart - SHOPPING FACILITY ASSISTANCE SYSTEMS, DEVICES AND METHODS TO DRIVE MOVABLE ITEM CONTAINERS authored by Dr. Donald High (Walmart’s Former Chief Scientist) along with Michael Atchley and David Winkle. Hidden behind a mountain of patents and reference citations is where we can start to see why they no longer needed Bossa Nova.
In the center of the top of Figure 1 we can see that visual inputs were a part of the Walmart’s plan to turn the shopping cart into a jack of all trades. Chris Albrecht of The Spoon outlined some of the prominent features that Walmart has included in this patent for development:
Customer assistance – a “tagalong” feature would allow robot shopping carts to lead or follow shoppers around the store
Interactive controls – shoppers could speak or enter via touch screen items they are looking for and the shopping cart would guide them
Worker assistance – items for re-stocking could be sent to specific locations in-store
Remote shopping – via an interactive screen, shoppers at home could virtually accompany an in-store shopper
Property detection – the store would know where all their shopping carts are and when they are abandoned
Surveillance – video cameras could be attached to the carts to serve “various security purposes”
These sound like and are some very impressive features that will take the customer journey into a very new and unchartered space. These applications could help to hurdle a number of road bumps in the customer journey that currently exist as well as help to bring down the operational cost of fulfilling e-commerce baskets. I imagine we might get an announcement in the near future where Walmart announces that they are rolling out these out in their test stores - specifically Store No. 8 near Bentonville or in their Intelligent Retail Lab in Long Island, NY. Either way, it is very exciting and hopefully we can see these robots in action soon.
