Robots in a Store Near You

Including interesting statement from Wal-Mart, which has now emerged as the leader in brick and mortar grocery robotics ....  Talk and link to transcription:

Groceries And Gadgets: The Robots Coming To A Supermarket Near You    in WBUR via O'Reilly

With Meghna Chakrabarti

Much more at the link, including a positioning statement by Wal-Mart.

There are robots roaming the aisles of Walmart and other grocery stores. Monitoring inventory, cleaning up spills and potentially replacing workers. Automation is coming to a supermarket near you.

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Guests:
Andrew McAfee, co-director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. Associate director of the Center for Digital Business at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Co-author of "Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing our Digital" and "The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies." (@amcafee)

David Pinn, vice president of strategy for Brain Corp, which creates the software for Walmart’s autonomous floor scrubbers. Walmart is adding the floor scrubbers to 1,500 stores. (@braincor)

Erikka Knuti, communications director for The United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which represents 1.3 million workers in grocery stores, retail and other industries. (@erikkaknuti)
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Wal-Mart Floor Cleaning and Complex Environments

Note the claim of being able to operate ' ... to effectively and safely function in complex, crowded environments, ensuring increased productivity and efficiency across applications .... '  That is,  in the same environments as people.   This will grow as a challenge to get robots cooperating with people, passively or actively ...

Walmart Leads the Way...in Floor Scrubbing Robots? 
in ZDNet    by Greg Nichols, with Video

By the end of next month, Walmart will deploy floor-scrubbing robots programmed to map out pathways via demonstration through the BrainOS operating system (OS) from Brain Corp. Store associates will walk the stores’ floors, guiding the robots along a quick demonstration route. Afterwards, BrainOS will take over to scan the area to be cleaned, while monitoring for people or new obstacles using onboard sensors. Said Brain Corp.'s Eugene Izhikevich, "BrainOS technology allows robots to effectively and safely function in complex, crowded environments, ensuring increased productivity and efficiency across applications." The scrubbing robots are the latest artificial intelligence solution explored by Walmart, as the retailer also uses robots from the Bossa Nova hardware company to scan shelves and aggregate customer activity in select retail outlets. ... "