More robots: Walmart introduces thousands of machines to work in its stores

Shelf Robot Scanner - Right

Walmart employs even more robots as a work force. Last week, the company announced an increase in its headquarters "automated assistants." They will help the company to cope with all the "trivial" tasks, such as cleaning the floors, issuing orders to check labels and tracking the location of goods on the shelves. Thousands of robots and special turrets go to work in the coming months. This is the largest robotization in the history of this world's largest supermarket chain. But experts in the industry are worried that there is no place for people at all.

The first to go to work are cleaning robots with the code name "Auto-C (from" Cleaner "?), Presented at the end of last year . They themselves determine the best way to clean the floor of supermarkets, so they no longer need an employee who used to sit at their wheel.

Now it takes an average of two hours for a person to walk around the store. The car will be much slower (five to six hours), since it has serious limits on speed: 3-4 km / h, to ensure the absence of any accidents. Then, as the autopilot proves its reliability and accuracy, the speed may increase.

In the past, during the testing period, security guards went to the store with every cleaning robot. Now Walmart is convinced that they are not needed. The public quickly gets used to the update, and does not even notice that nobody is sitting behind their cleaning machine. If necessary, she quietly beeps, warning buyers, and if someone decides to climb on her or break something, a siren starts yelling and the supermarket’s security staff quickly resorts to the robot.

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Floor cleaning is not the only task of these machines. Front, back and sides of them have sensors built in to transmit information to Walmart servers. Machine learning, deep learning and computer vision help to calculate which way to go through the store will be the most effective. The duration of the route, time of cleaning, the probability of collision with visitors and the total energy consumption of the path are taken into account. As a result, each subsequent lap makes the car a little more efficient than the previous one. And yet - she never misses a dirty spot, and works much more accurately than any cleaning man with 40 years of experience.

These machines are created in collaboration with Brain Corp. In December, after the first round of tests, Walmart announced that it was going to introduce 360 ​​such robots by February-2019. Now, apparently, cars have proven their effectiveness. The company decided to install another 1,500 devices this year, so the total figure will reach 1860. This means that more than a third of Walmart supermarkets will now be cleaned with robots.

The company also expands the number of shelf scanners "Auto-S" (apparently from the "Scanner"). These machines have been tested by her since 2017. Then she installed them in her 50 stores, now she adds another 300. These devices are rather oddly shaped, like mailboxes with a long, long arm, they spend most of their time at the charging station. But when an employee gives them the task - to check the stocks of goods in the warehouse, to identify the incorrectly indicated goods on the shelves, to check labels or price tags - they are sent to scan the shelves. Work so far slower than a man who can quickly run through everything with his eyes. But errors - zero.

Sarjun Skaff, founder of the startup Bossa Nova , responsible for these robots, says in an interview:

If you think about it, what can you call the latest innovation that happened in the stores? I can only recall self-checkout counters and barcodes. Retailers have always been very accurate with product tracking - from the manufacturer, in containers, through customs, through a warehouse or distribution center. But when a product enters the store, it's like a black box. No one will say for sure if there is a theft there or if each product lies in its place. And checking every product is an extremely dull task.

People are now needed only to give the command to the robot. And they themselves can deal with the elimination of more important problems or spending time with customers, improving the atmosphere in the store.

Walmart also introduces smart shipping conveyors that can take goods from trucks and send them to the right places in the warehouse. The company calls them FAST Unloaders. The conveyor with sensors itself determines what drives it, and this speeds up the shipment process several dozen times.

Unloading goods, the company says, was one of the most unloved jobs of her employees, so it was difficult for her to keep people in this position. Last summer, the company tested 30 trucks, and the experiment was so successful that it added 10 each week. Now, another 1,200 such smart conveyors will be installed in supermarkets, bringing the total figure to 1,700.

About Pickup Towers, machines for issuing online purchases, we have already told . They were also actively tested last year - they helped fight with Amazon, simplifying the issuance of online orders. Delivery cost - $ 0 for orders from $ 30. You take the parcel in any Walmart store, where there is such a tower, you only need a smartphone with a bar code. In 2017, 200 of these machines were installed for issuing online purchases, in 2018 another 500. Now the company adds 900 more, bringing the total to 1600. You show the device your smartphone - you receive the package.

The company says that all these technologies will help free employees from “the most boring and constantly repetitive tasks”, and give them more time to support customers face to face. But, of course, so now everyone is saying. In fact, the list of works remaining for real people is not impressive. Security guards and cashiers (and this is only because the company does not yet have its own technology level, Amazon Go , although Microsoft is working very hard together).

Responding to journalists, the company also stated that it will have a lot of work for people ... in the field of fruit and vegetable selection! That is, the separation of old and rotten mandarin from the young and fresh. Walmart says that groceries are now responsible for more than half of its annual revenue, and this area is especially actively developing online, so there will be a lot of work here. And the robots are now installed where the company is already experiencing problems with the selection of personnel, and where was the biggest routine.

A Walmart representative says:

So far, we see that the introduction of technology reduces labor turnover. We remove the most unloved types of activities. It is not the whole post that is being automated, but only a certain of its most primitive part. The rest of the person remains necessary, moreover - he is freeing up time to do something more interesting, such as customer service.

Over the past year and a half, we have added more than 40,000 jobs in the field of fruit and vegetable selection in supermarkets for online orders. More recently, these posts simply did not exist. Result: more and more employees stay with us for a long time, the lowest staff turnover rate for the last decade.

For staff, this sounds very disappointing. Now 1.5 million people work at Walmart, this is one of the main US employers. And few who have doubts that the work on the selection of fresh fruit will try to automate the next. It is unlikely that it is much more difficult than the definition of the goods going through the pipeline. And the reduction in turnover is not a symptom of the fact that people have less and less choice, and any work is better than none?