6 ms·

LoweBot

101 points by adenadel 10y ago

asimuvPR 10y ago
Some observations: - The ground clearance might pose a problem in a hardware store. Every time I visit a Lowes or Home Depot the floors have debris. Some aisles will have products scattered on the floor (the screws/bolts/nuts aisle specially). - Ever try to use a touchscreen with dirty hands? - It will probably be used more by management to keep track of inventory. This I figure is the biggest benefit. Having the robot scan the store could potentially lower the amount of personnel required to do inventory counts. I'm excited about this. It might seem like a kiosk on wheels but could open up potential advancement/business opportunities once people get used to them. A lot of people still perceive robots as "evil".
- hga 10y ago
  The ground clearance might pose a problem in a hardware store. Every time I visit a Lowes or Home Depot the floors have debris. Some aisles will have products scattered on the floor (the screws/bolts/nuts aisle specially). This would seem to depend on the store, I've been spending a lot of time at each since I bought a house built in 1910 in late May, and that doesn't describe either of the ones I've been visiting (in Joplin, MO). A store that wants a LoweBot to succeed, or one picked to get one, would in theory try to make sure this is generally true, on the other hand, creating floor debris would be a way for the staff to throw a monkey-wrench into a deployment.
  - Jack000 10y ago
    this should be pretty easily solved with a forward/downward facing depth sensor (to identify and avoid the debris). The fact that they didn't do this says to me that debris may not have been a major problem in testing.
    - hga 10y ago
      And/or it can deal with that it comes across. A thin package of screws and nuts, e.g. Home Depot sells a line where a huge selection is like $1.83 or $1.18 (e.g. each package will have a certain balanced set of nuts and bolts, or a few screws), and those packages are sufficiently flat I'd expect them to be no obstacle. Bigger stuff it could just push forward, ideally sensing when that was happening and backing up and going another way. The big trick would be the stuff just low enough to get under it, but that would then block it and get stuck. This is just off the top of my head, and I'm intrinsically not interesting in robots, I'll bet this is a well developed area in it by now.
- KC8ZKF 10y ago
  Stick a broom up their ass, and they can sweep the floor at the same time.
ourmandave 10y ago
Aw, it's C-3P-Lowe. Questions for the Designers... - In that awkward "will there be anything else?" moment, after it's led me to the hard-to-find screws, what font size will the "fuck off" button have? - Is it going to hover just off-camera, watching me with TSA level scanners, to make sure any screws don't go "missing"? - Couldn't this be replaced with an In-store Map app I'll never download? (Unless the paint section is a Pokemon Stop.) - Where's the off switch?
- evan_ 10y ago
  Lobot would have been the better Star Wars reference. http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Lobot http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Lobot
koolba 10y ago
I get the marketing/publicity angle of this, but there's no way this is cheaper than hiring an actual person. At least for the part of interacting with customers. > Furthermore, LoweBot is able to assist with inventory monitoring in real-time, which help detect patterns that will able to guide future business decisions. This sounds interesting. Having an army of robots marching down the aisles and scanning inventory seems useful. Wouldn't be as accurate as a human checking behind a box or finding mislabeled merchandise but would probably be more than an 80/20 solution to the problem.
- IanCal 10y ago
  > there's no way this is cheaper than hiring an actual person. I'm not so sure. People are pretty expensive. Lowes are open 6am to 10pm 5 days a week and 8-8 on the weekends. That's 104 hours per week, or ~5400 hours per year. 10% downtime and you're still looking at 5000 hours per year. Google suggests sales associates get $11.70/hour. If you add on maybe 20-30% overhead for all the associated hiring costs, taxes and extra management needed the equivalent cost would be around $75k/year. I expect the true figure would be higher. How much are these bots? They seem to be reasonably generic, but let's say a 5 year total cost is $200k, does that sound reasonable? That's around half the cost of a real person, so if each can replace about half of a person then that's a good deal. And that all relies on what I think are fairly low overheads, a reasonable amount of downtime for the bots, quite a high price for the bot itself and an assumption that the bots can't do anything extra that saves time (the inventory scanning for example, or collecting more useful information). At the very least, I don't think this is obviously much more expensive, and depending on a few factors could easily be much cheaper than a real person.
  - shalmanese 10y ago
    Furthermore, the relevant metric isn't current price, it's the price at the time these get deployed at scale which, for a giant company, is at least 3 - 5 years. Large companies can afford to absorb many millions of dollars worth of losses for pilot projects because the learnings have the potential to far outweigh the losses. Even if each of these robots cost a million bucks a piece, if one robot can help Lowes learn something that reduces the cost of future robots by $100, spread across a 10,000 robot deployment, that robot has paid for itself.
codecamper 10y ago
ex ter min ate! ex ter min ate! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxD-5z_xHBU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxD-5z_xHBU
aaronharder 10y ago
Why not just an app? Cheaper, and no scarcity issues: one for every customer.
- chillydawg 10y ago
  I think there are different segments of the market here. Personally, I'd quite like to be led to the drill bits by a robot. Having a little map pop up on my phone via AR would be 99% as good, though, sure.
- joshontheweb 10y ago
  This. I always find myself a bit frustrated when shopping that I can't just open an app and see a map of the location of the item I want. A robot for this seems like overkill. I suppose it is probably just as much for marketing.
- mrfusion 10y ago
  Or screens or kiosks around the store.
- billhathaway 10y ago
  Lowes does have an app with in-store maps. When you search you can see product inventory and where items are located in the store. I've used it a few times with moderate success. It only has 25 reviews on App Store with 2/5 rating, so that might be lowering adoption. For comparison the Home Depot app has 186 reviews with 4/5 stars.
  - randallsquared 10y ago
    Sadly, the employees apparently shuffle things around for local reasons and the app doesn't get updated. The employees will then badmouth the app to customers (well, one customer, at least...). "Oh, the app? Yeah, that's wrong a lot... We actually put that item over there at the end of that other aisle, because we wanted to put other-item here instead."
    - 10y ago
ape4 10y ago
People are great at vague queries... where can I get the thing that goes up and down in the back of a toilet?
- Avshalom 10y ago
  My favorite request: "I'm looking for things that are owls"
  - defen 10y ago
    What was that person trying to find? Dowels? Awls?
    - proksoup 10y ago
      Owl statues. Decorative, or to scare away other birds and rodents.
      - spiralganglion 10y ago
        I collect owl-themed objects, so to me it's a perfectly sensible query. I've surely uttered those words myself once or twice.
- corpus 10y ago
  I'm often curious how far Google has gotten in answering vague questions like this. Google's answer is pretty reasonable in this case: Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=where+can+I+get+the+thing+that+goes+up+and+down+in+the+back+of+a+toilet https://www.google.com/search?q=where+can+I+get+the+thing+th... => First result [Parts of a Toilet | The Family Handyman] Compare to Bing, which misses the point: Bing: http://www.bing.com/search?q=where%20can%20I%20get%20the%20thing%20that%20goes%20up%20and%20down%20in%20the%20back%20of%20a%20toilet http://www.bing.com/search?q=where%20can%20I%20get%20the%20t... => First result [Signs Of A Sewer Drain Clog]
Pxtl 10y ago
If I ask lowebot for help, does that make me lando calrisian?
jvandonsel 10y ago
How is their localization and navigation done? Visual? GPS?
- radiorental 10y ago
  initially with SLAM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_and_mapping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_and_...

101 points by adenadel 10y ago

Some observations: - The ground clearance might pose a problem in a hardware store. Every time I visit a Lowes or Home Depot the floors have debris. Some aisles will have products scattered on the floor (the screws/bolts/nuts aisle specially). - Ever try to use a touchscreen with dirty hands? - It will probably be used more by management to keep track of inventory. This I figure is the biggest benefit. Having the robot scan the store could potentially lower the amount of personnel required to do inventory counts. I'm excited about this. It might seem like a kiosk on wheels but could open up potential advancement/business opportunities once people get used to them. A lot of people still perceive robots as "evil".

hga 10y ago
The ground clearance might pose a problem in a hardware store. Every time I visit a Lowes or Home Depot the floors have debris. Some aisles will have products scattered on the floor (the screws/bolts/nuts aisle specially). This would seem to depend on the store, I've been spending a lot of time at each since I bought a house built in 1910 in late May, and that doesn't describe either of the ones I've been visiting (in Joplin, MO). A store that wants a LoweBot to succeed, or one picked to get one, would in theory try to make sure this is generally true, on the other hand, creating floor debris would be a way for the staff to throw a monkey-wrench into a deployment.
- Jack000 10y ago
  this should be pretty easily solved with a forward/downward facing depth sensor (to identify and avoid the debris). The fact that they didn't do this says to me that debris may not have been a major problem in testing.
  - hga 10y ago
    And/or it can deal with that it comes across. A thin package of screws and nuts, e.g. Home Depot sells a line where a huge selection is like $1.83 or $1.18 (e.g. each package will have a certain balanced set of nuts and bolts, or a few screws), and those packages are sufficiently flat I'd expect them to be no obstacle. Bigger stuff it could just push forward, ideally sensing when that was happening and backing up and going another way. The big trick would be the stuff just low enough to get under it, but that would then block it and get stuck. This is just off the top of my head, and I'm intrinsically not interesting in robots, I'll bet this is a well developed area in it by now.
KC8ZKF 10y ago
Stick a broom up their ass, and they can sweep the floor at the same time.

ourmandave 10y ago

Aw, it's C-3P-Lowe. Questions for the Designers... - In that awkward "will there be anything else?" moment, after it's led me to the hard-to-find screws, what font size will the "fuck off" button have? - Is it going to hover just off-camera, watching me with TSA level scanners, to make sure any screws don't go "missing"? - Couldn't this be replaced with an In-store Map app I'll never download? (Unless the paint section is a Pokemon Stop.) - Where's the off switch?

evan_ 10y ago
Lobot would have been the better Star Wars reference. http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Lobot http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Lobot

koolba 10y ago

I get the marketing/publicity angle of this, but there's no way this is cheaper than hiring an actual person. At least for the part of interacting with customers. > Furthermore, LoweBot is able to assist with inventory monitoring in real-time, which help detect patterns that will able to guide future business decisions. This sounds interesting. Having an army of robots marching down the aisles and scanning inventory seems useful. Wouldn't be as accurate as a human checking behind a box or finding mislabeled merchandise but would probably be more than an 80/20 solution to the problem.

IanCal 10y ago
> there's no way this is cheaper than hiring an actual person. I'm not so sure. People are pretty expensive. Lowes are open 6am to 10pm 5 days a week and 8-8 on the weekends. That's 104 hours per week, or ~5400 hours per year. 10% downtime and you're still looking at 5000 hours per year. Google suggests sales associates get $11.70/hour. If you add on maybe 20-30% overhead for all the associated hiring costs, taxes and extra management needed the equivalent cost would be around $75k/year. I expect the true figure would be higher. How much are these bots? They seem to be reasonably generic, but let's say a 5 year total cost is $200k, does that sound reasonable? That's around half the cost of a real person, so if each can replace about half of a person then that's a good deal. And that all relies on what I think are fairly low overheads, a reasonable amount of downtime for the bots, quite a high price for the bot itself and an assumption that the bots can't do anything extra that saves time (the inventory scanning for example, or collecting more useful information). At the very least, I don't think this is obviously much more expensive, and depending on a few factors could easily be much cheaper than a real person.
- shalmanese 10y ago
  Furthermore, the relevant metric isn't current price, it's the price at the time these get deployed at scale which, for a giant company, is at least 3 - 5 years. Large companies can afford to absorb many millions of dollars worth of losses for pilot projects because the learnings have the potential to far outweigh the losses. Even if each of these robots cost a million bucks a piece, if one robot can help Lowes learn something that reduces the cost of future robots by $100, spread across a 10,000 robot deployment, that robot has paid for itself.

codecamper 10y ago

ex ter min ate! ex ter min ate! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxD-5z_xHBU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxD-5z_xHBU

aaronharder 10y ago

Why not just an app? Cheaper, and no scarcity issues: one for every customer.

chillydawg 10y ago
I think there are different segments of the market here. Personally, I'd quite like to be led to the drill bits by a robot. Having a little map pop up on my phone via AR would be 99% as good, though, sure.
joshontheweb 10y ago
This. I always find myself a bit frustrated when shopping that I can't just open an app and see a map of the location of the item I want. A robot for this seems like overkill. I suppose it is probably just as much for marketing.
mrfusion 10y ago
Or screens or kiosks around the store.
billhathaway 10y ago
Lowes does have an app with in-store maps. When you search you can see product inventory and where items are located in the store. I've used it a few times with moderate success. It only has 25 reviews on App Store with 2/5 rating, so that might be lowering adoption. For comparison the Home Depot app has 186 reviews with 4/5 stars.
- randallsquared 10y ago
  Sadly, the employees apparently shuffle things around for local reasons and the app doesn't get updated. The employees will then badmouth the app to customers (well, one customer, at least...). "Oh, the app? Yeah, that's wrong a lot... We actually put that item over there at the end of that other aisle, because we wanted to put other-item here instead."
  - 10y ago

ape4 10y ago

People are great at vague queries... where can I get the thing that goes up and down in the back of a toilet?

Avshalom 10y ago
My favorite request: "I'm looking for things that are owls"
- defen 10y ago
  What was that person trying to find? Dowels? Awls?
  - proksoup 10y ago
    Owl statues. Decorative, or to scare away other birds and rodents.
    - spiralganglion 10y ago
      I collect owl-themed objects, so to me it's a perfectly sensible query. I've surely uttered those words myself once or twice.
corpus 10y ago
I'm often curious how far Google has gotten in answering vague questions like this. Google's answer is pretty reasonable in this case: Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=where+can+I+get+the+thing+that+goes+up+and+down+in+the+back+of+a+toilet https://www.google.com/search?q=where+can+I+get+the+thing+th... => First result [Parts of a Toilet | The Family Handyman] Compare to Bing, which misses the point: Bing: http://www.bing.com/search?q=where%20can%20I%20get%20the%20thing%20that%20goes%20up%20and%20down%20in%20the%20back%20of%20a%20toilet http://www.bing.com/search?q=where%20can%20I%20get%20the%20t... => First result [Signs Of A Sewer Drain Clog]

Pxtl 10y ago

If I ask lowebot for help, does that make me lando calrisian?

jvandonsel 10y ago

How is their localization and navigation done? Visual? GPS?

radiorental 10y ago
initially with SLAM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_and_mapping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_and_...