34 ms·

Walmart drops inventory robots from its stores

128 points by vector_spaces 6y ago

rootsudo 6y ago
More "The world's largest supermarket chain said it had ended its partnership with Bossa Nova Robotics, who made the roving robots." Vs going away from the idea entirely. WalMart labs is heavily interested on automation to reduce human labor needed.
- dalbasal 6y ago
  >>WalMart labs is heavily interested on automation to reduce human labor needed. Well... There really is no question of interest. They'd obviously like to automate more and reduce labour. The interesting questions relate to the trials, tribulations, successes and failures. It would be a more informative article with some indication of how much they're investing in such initiatives. Why did this initiative fail, etc.
- wil421 6y ago
  Of course they want to reduce labor. They are the largest (non-govt.) employer in the US and largest employer in most states. They have over 1.5 million employees and over 2 million with contractors.
  - tsjq 6y ago
    That's almost 1% of US population employed by a single employer !
    - leetrout 6y ago
      > The federal government employs nearly 9.1 million workers, comprising nearly 6 percent of total employment in the United States. Both are shockingly large.
      - wongarsu 6y ago
        For a random comparison: The entire German government (federal+state+local) employs 3.7 million people, about 8.8% of total employment. Another 0.77 million (1.8% of total employment) are indirectly employed in public services. The German federal government alone are just 0.47 million, or 1.1% of total employment.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - dalbasal 6y ago
        ...different kinds of shocking. The federal government is a sector, comparable to "mining" or whatnot. Big is still big in the one-prick-many-ouchies sense, but sector size is not the same thing. The "resolution" of private markets is a major characteristic.
        BurningFrog 6y ago
        That's a reasonable point, but also no other sector has one person (DJT) as CEO.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        kube-system 6y ago
        Eh, the federal government doesn't fall entirely under the President's power. The position doesn't even have authority over the entire executive branch. Also, as far as the "government sector" of the economy goes -- 87% of government employees work for state or local governments.
      - thaumasiotes 6y ago
        I don't see why 1% of the workforce being employed by the same employer is supposed to be shocking? Suppose you have a village of 400 people. What are the odds that somebody there employs 4 other guys in some capacity? That's more than 1% of the workforce.
- linuxftw 6y ago
  Walmart labs is just the group of people running the .com in Sunnyvale. They don't have any actual labs or innovation. Their ideas of "Robots!" and sending hourly employees to your home with merchandise instead of paying actual delivery drivers were two ideas that came from them recently. Everything they touch is broken.
petra 6y ago
From someone inside Walmart: """ The original idea was to have a few extra security cameras and some mirrors. I think it took 2 mirrors per aisle and only a few 4k color security cameras with infrared to cover the fast moving items. After prototyping we find exactly what you said. Turns out it doesn't matter how well you know you need to stock items, if you don't give enough people-hours to do it, the number of items on the shelf doesn't change. The robots were probably pitched by the Walmart dot com or Jet dot com guys. Thier projects always were greenlit without any analysis and rarely worked. """ https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/jmx78e/walmart_ends_contract_with_robotics_company_opts/gayzr7g/ https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/jmx78e/walmart_...
- roland35 6y ago
  Thanks for the insight, that seems plausible to me! A moving robot doesn't make too much sense in this application since the products and shelving is stationary. It just adds a ton of complexity. What's interesting is the Amazon store concept which just like this post is heavily based on cameras watching the shelves.
  - GarrisonPrime 6y ago
    The idea was for the shelf scanning robots to send messages when they found a low stock item or a mess, and then a human could just load up a cart with stock from the back room and head directly to the problem areas. This would be in contrast to having people regularly walk every aisle and examine everything personally, going back and forth to get stock repeatedly. Much time was wasted. As a former Walmart employee I was actually excited to see these proposed. But now with so many people walking the aisles collecting items for pickup, I guess they’re just going to have them send “problem detected” messages instead of the robots. Which is fine I guess. Shopping there has become an even greater hassle with all the employees and their pickup carts, but that’s a whole other issue.
    - ntsplnkv2 6y ago
      All items are scanned on the way out anyway - you should be able to get an idea when an item is low on stock from that alone, no? Sure there will still be things like people in the store that haven't checked out yet, but... What am I missing?
mschuster91 6y ago
As someone who worked in a supermarket... this robot is something that definitely can help the staff, especially in large locations. Customers always manage to spill stuff, throw back items from the cooling section randomly in some rack... it's not a bad idea to leave the monotonous patrol duty to a robot and only act when the robot detects something. The obviously best solution to keep track of inventory would be "smart racks" with RFID tags on each product (side note: that could also be used to deal with tracking stolen products, return policy abusers, people who want to legit return something but lost the receipt, counterfeit issues), but building such a rack is likely enormously expensive...
- michaelt 6y ago
  > The obviously best solution to keep track of inventory would be "smart racks" with RFID tags on each product As someone who's deployed several industrial RFID systems: I doubt we'll ever see an RFID tag on every item in Walmart. The first reason is the cost of tags: Even the cheapest EPC Gen2 RFID tags cost more than 1 cent - and nobody selling a 20 cent can of beans is going to pay that. Barcodes, on the other hand, come free with the product's printed packaging. And the tag's performance varies - the super-low-price tags might work fine for cardboard packages, but not work on metal cans, for example, as sticking a radio antenna to a bit of metal and having it work is a complex business. The second reason is reliability: Even in a highly controlled environment, where every tag is on an identical item and you're willing to spend 20 cents per tag, RFID is hard to get right. One thing that causes reliability problems is RFID is tough to test. Reflections and interference patterns mean you'll get areas where reading will fail, even when inches away reading works very well - and if you move metal in the environment around, it all changes and the nulls move. And that's before you get into having a thousand different products from a hundred different suppliers, all of whom now have to learn this new RFID technology. Another thing that leads to reliability problems is simple mechanical matters: It's tough for an RFID tag to survive being in between two metal cans that bump together. And if you're hoping to do something like detecting thefts, a system that is merely 99.99% reliable is going to generate far more false alarms than it does real alarms.
  - bluGill 6y ago
marketingPro 6y ago
I still think we are a decade away from this technology being implemented. I imagine with OCR advances (and similar) it would make more True Positives, eliminating the need for a worker. If a worker still needs to check an isle it almost defeats the purpose.
everyone 6y ago
How come back doesnt work in browser on BBC? Thats like some scam / ad site stuff.
- superhuzza 6y ago
  Works fine for me
- Mordisquitos 6y ago
  It's not exactly that the back button doesn't work. It's because for some reason they seem to be redirecting in some weird non-HTTP way from their `.co.uk` domain to their `.com`, even though you already got a complete `200` response from `.co.uk`. As a result, clicking the back button only once from the `.com` takes you to the `.co.uk`, which redirects you back to the `.com`. Clicking twice, or if you follow the `.com` link in the first place, does not affect the back button in any way.
ptero 6y ago
Here is an armchair strategist opinion :). This seems to be an approach of "let's replicate what humans do with robots", which often fails due to complexity (humans are very versatile). For example, the separate problems of finding empty shelves and restocking those are much more complex if you try to solve them together. Do it with a ground-moving robot, competing for floor space with humans and it may be hopeless. But if you aim for just finding empty shelves you can probably do so with a few high-res ceiling mounted cameras and algorithms. This also allows for incremental enhancements. If the system initially detects missed inventory at 80% of the shelves it is a good start (there are now fewer shelves for humans to check). Incremental improvement usually beats trying to solve complex problems in one go. My 2c.
- bluGill 6y ago
  They already have this information from the cash registers though. it isn't up to the second like the system you proposed, but it is "good enough".
  - dharmab 6y ago
    Items can run out of stock before hitting the registers- people spent a long time in big department stores like Wal-Mart.
    - bluGill 6y ago
      That doesn't matter, it takes more than an hour to get the replacements on the truck and the truck to walmart anyway. WalMart doesn't store much extra inventory in the back room. Everything comes off the truck and goes right onto the shelf.
  - colinmhayes 6y ago
    People steal shit and put shit back in the wrong spot all the time.
    - bluGill 6y ago
yters 6y ago
What if they made Walmart be a giant vending machine, automatically fed with conveyor belts from a warehouse in the back?
- tenebrisalietum 6y ago
  This might not be true, but I think Walmart makes money by selling shelf space visibility to brands--e.g. General Mills pays Walmart money to have products on an eye-level place on the shelf.
  - yters 6y ago
    Or, Walmart can pivot to entirely online delivery shopping and save loads of money by not having stores. Or, Amazon can slide into the groceries space.
bckygldstn 6y ago
There's a few comments asking why this can't be done by subtracting sales from ordered inventory. All large retailers do this, I've worked on this problem, but there are lots of things that reduce the accuracy of the data-driven approach: • Theft • Spoiled/broken products • Customers taking a product then browsing for another hour before checking out • Customers buying multiple flavours of a product with the same price but different UPCs, which the cashier rings up by scanning the first product then hitting "times 10" • There is stock on the shelf, but it's hidden behind something else or out of reach • There is stock in the store, but not on the shelf (many retailers don't track backroom → shelf stocking) • Product is stocked in multiple locations in the store, one of which is empty • Plus all the usual data issues caused by wrong barcode scanned, data entry error, out-of-date information about units per box, etc Those issues are all small, but still significant: • For slow-moving products, being a few units off can mean the difference between out of stock and 1 month stock remaining. • Even for fast-moving products these errors add up over time, you never really get a ground-truth event to reset the error drift. Stocktake and out-of-stock help but are infrequent and not a perfect reflection of reality. There's a big unsexy industry working on this problem with data and human checks. The economics of robots, drones, smart shelves, and smart carts don't seem competitive right now. When you have 10k stores in the US, the expense is massive.
- ictebres 6y ago
  > Customers buying multiple flavours of a product with the same price but different UPCs, which the cashier rings up by scanning the first product then hitting "times 10" I worked at retail (Uniqlo to be specific) and it was definetely a rule to not do this. They wanted us to scan everything one by one even if they were the same color and size. This allowed for a pretty accurate information on stock, e.g. we could see how many of a given sweater in given size and color is still in storage etc. Probably this is too tedius for some retail (groceries with very small unit price) but very smart rule in general.
  - rurp 6y ago
    The rule is probably on the books at most retail stores, getting everyone to follow it all the time though is another matter. Cashiers and their direct supervisors could easily not understand or care about the rule and ignore it to save a few seconds on big orders.
jelliclesfarm 6y ago
I heard someone speak of the Bosso Nova at Walmart at a presentation and most of it was off record. They were reluctant to be open about the Walmart robots. From what I heard/saw I figured there was something more because what it seemed to be achieving was very low hanging fruit. Walmart is notorious for cutting costs and keeping prices low for shoppers and a razor thin profit margin. Their real strength is their supply chain and I have tremendous respect for what Walmart does...and I don’t think anyone matches Walmart when it comes to supply chain management. I heard even amazon’s best are from Walmart. Having said that..I could see no way Bossa Nova bots were compatible with Walmart principles. IMO, they should all pivot and work on autonomous Ag bots. Unlike warehouses, there are multiple environments and multiple problems to solve in Ag. And it’s under explored and under developed. I remember thinking that this(walmart bots) is similar to Ag robotics. Robotics and automation companies coming up with a solution first and then hope that they can define the problem later. They are creating solutions for problems that don’t exist in the first place.
pletsch 6y ago
During my gap year, I ran the backroom at a local Wal-Mart. While I was there, we switched to a new fulfillment system that involved putting all of the stocking responsibilities on one team, instead of spreading it between departments. The problem isn't the technology, it's the physical amount of product coming in compared to man hours. A typical 8hr shift would look like: - 3hrs to unload the general merch delivery truck. An hour to unload the two freezer/cooler that would arrive at some point throughout the shift - 1hr30m of breaks - 1hr setup for night shift - 1hr of 'picks', which was stock we had in the backroom that the system said could go out. This doesn't include the actual stocking of said items That leaves 1hr30m to unload all the stock from the trucks, which doesn't happen. Even if these robots were in my store and could tell me for certain that products needed to be reshelved, the man power isn't there to do it. It ends up being that all the teams achieve their department goals except for the fulfillment team that gets killed. edit: formatting
Simulacra 6y ago
I’m surprised that these were able to last as long as they did without human interference and damage. I assumed generally that these robots would not last due to humans messing with them.
credit_guy 6y ago
I see an emerging consensus here on HN that automating retail is a hard thing to do. Somehow though, Amazon Go just works. No robots, just cameras and machine learning. It just seems to me Amazon is able to do this and Walmart isn't. For now. My bet is that 15 years from now it's going to be as common as an iPhone now (remember how common was an iPhone in 2005? not very...)
- julienb_sea 6y ago
  To be fair Amazon Go also doesn't use robots for any sort of inventory management. They literally have humans go around the store as needed, based on information collected by the cameras & tracking systems.

128 points by vector_spaces 6y ago

More "The world's largest supermarket chain said it had ended its partnership with Bossa Nova Robotics, who made the roving robots." Vs going away from the idea entirely. WalMart labs is heavily interested on automation to reduce human labor needed.

dalbasal 6y ago
>>WalMart labs is heavily interested on automation to reduce human labor needed. Well... There really is no question of interest. They'd obviously like to automate more and reduce labour. The interesting questions relate to the trials, tribulations, successes and failures. It would be a more informative article with some indication of how much they're investing in such initiatives. Why did this initiative fail, etc.
wil421 6y ago
Of course they want to reduce labor. They are the largest (non-govt.) employer in the US and largest employer in most states. They have over 1.5 million employees and over 2 million with contractors.
- tsjq 6y ago
  That's almost 1% of US population employed by a single employer !
  - leetrout 6y ago
    > The federal government employs nearly 9.1 million workers, comprising nearly 6 percent of total employment in the United States. Both are shockingly large.
    - wongarsu 6y ago
      For a random comparison: The entire German government (federal+state+local) employs 3.7 million people, about 8.8% of total employment. Another 0.77 million (1.8% of total employment) are indirectly employed in public services. The German federal government alone are just 0.47 million, or 1.1% of total employment.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - dalbasal 6y ago
      ...different kinds of shocking. The federal government is a sector, comparable to "mining" or whatnot. Big is still big in the one-prick-many-ouchies sense, but sector size is not the same thing. The "resolution" of private markets is a major characteristic.
      - BurningFrog 6y ago
        That's a reasonable point, but also no other sector has one person (DJT) as CEO.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        kube-system 6y ago
        Eh, the federal government doesn't fall entirely under the President's power. The position doesn't even have authority over the entire executive branch. Also, as far as the "government sector" of the economy goes -- 87% of government employees work for state or local governments.
    - thaumasiotes 6y ago
      I don't see why 1% of the workforce being employed by the same employer is supposed to be shocking? Suppose you have a village of 400 people. What are the odds that somebody there employs 4 other guys in some capacity? That's more than 1% of the workforce.
linuxftw 6y ago
Walmart labs is just the group of people running the .com in Sunnyvale. They don't have any actual labs or innovation. Their ideas of "Robots!" and sending hourly employees to your home with merchandise instead of paying actual delivery drivers were two ideas that came from them recently. Everything they touch is broken.

petra 6y ago

From someone inside Walmart: """ The original idea was to have a few extra security cameras and some mirrors. I think it took 2 mirrors per aisle and only a few 4k color security cameras with infrared to cover the fast moving items. After prototyping we find exactly what you said. Turns out it doesn't matter how well you know you need to stock items, if you don't give enough people-hours to do it, the number of items on the shelf doesn't change. The robots were probably pitched by the Walmart dot com or Jet dot com guys. Thier projects always were greenlit without any analysis and rarely worked. """ https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/jmx78e/walmart_ends_contract_with_robotics_company_opts/gayzr7g/ https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/jmx78e/walmart_...

roland35 6y ago
Thanks for the insight, that seems plausible to me! A moving robot doesn't make too much sense in this application since the products and shelving is stationary. It just adds a ton of complexity. What's interesting is the Amazon store concept which just like this post is heavily based on cameras watching the shelves.
- GarrisonPrime 6y ago
  The idea was for the shelf scanning robots to send messages when they found a low stock item or a mess, and then a human could just load up a cart with stock from the back room and head directly to the problem areas. This would be in contrast to having people regularly walk every aisle and examine everything personally, going back and forth to get stock repeatedly. Much time was wasted. As a former Walmart employee I was actually excited to see these proposed. But now with so many people walking the aisles collecting items for pickup, I guess they’re just going to have them send “problem detected” messages instead of the robots. Which is fine I guess. Shopping there has become an even greater hassle with all the employees and their pickup carts, but that’s a whole other issue.
  - ntsplnkv2 6y ago
    All items are scanned on the way out anyway - you should be able to get an idea when an item is low on stock from that alone, no? Sure there will still be things like people in the store that haven't checked out yet, but... What am I missing?

mschuster91 6y ago

As someone who worked in a supermarket... this robot is something that definitely can help the staff, especially in large locations. Customers always manage to spill stuff, throw back items from the cooling section randomly in some rack... it's not a bad idea to leave the monotonous patrol duty to a robot and only act when the robot detects something. The obviously best solution to keep track of inventory would be "smart racks" with RFID tags on each product (side note: that could also be used to deal with tracking stolen products, return policy abusers, people who want to legit return something but lost the receipt, counterfeit issues), but building such a rack is likely enormously expensive...

michaelt 6y ago
> The obviously best solution to keep track of inventory would be "smart racks" with RFID tags on each product As someone who's deployed several industrial RFID systems: I doubt we'll ever see an RFID tag on every item in Walmart. The first reason is the cost of tags: Even the cheapest EPC Gen2 RFID tags cost more than 1 cent - and nobody selling a 20 cent can of beans is going to pay that. Barcodes, on the other hand, come free with the product's printed packaging. And the tag's performance varies - the super-low-price tags might work fine for cardboard packages, but not work on metal cans, for example, as sticking a radio antenna to a bit of metal and having it work is a complex business. The second reason is reliability: Even in a highly controlled environment, where every tag is on an identical item and you're willing to spend 20 cents per tag, RFID is hard to get right. One thing that causes reliability problems is RFID is tough to test. Reflections and interference patterns mean you'll get areas where reading will fail, even when inches away reading works very well - and if you move metal in the environment around, it all changes and the nulls move. And that's before you get into having a thousand different products from a hundred different suppliers, all of whom now have to learn this new RFID technology. Another thing that leads to reliability problems is simple mechanical matters: It's tough for an RFID tag to survive being in between two metal cans that bump together. And if you're hoping to do something like detecting thefts, a system that is merely 99.99% reliable is going to generate far more false alarms than it does real alarms.
- bluGill 6y ago

marketingPro 6y ago

I still think we are a decade away from this technology being implemented. I imagine with OCR advances (and similar) it would make more True Positives, eliminating the need for a worker. If a worker still needs to check an isle it almost defeats the purpose.

everyone 6y ago

How come back doesnt work in browser on BBC? Thats like some scam / ad site stuff.

superhuzza 6y ago
Works fine for me
Mordisquitos 6y ago
It's not exactly that the back button doesn't work. It's because for some reason they seem to be redirecting in some weird non-HTTP way from their `.co.uk` domain to their `.com`, even though you already got a complete `200` response from `.co.uk`. As a result, clicking the back button only once from the `.com` takes you to the `.co.uk`, which redirects you back to the `.com`. Clicking twice, or if you follow the `.com` link in the first place, does not affect the back button in any way.

ptero 6y ago

Here is an armchair strategist opinion :). This seems to be an approach of "let's replicate what humans do with robots", which often fails due to complexity (humans are very versatile). For example, the separate problems of finding empty shelves and restocking those are much more complex if you try to solve them together. Do it with a ground-moving robot, competing for floor space with humans and it may be hopeless. But if you aim for just finding empty shelves you can probably do so with a few high-res ceiling mounted cameras and algorithms. This also allows for incremental enhancements. If the system initially detects missed inventory at 80% of the shelves it is a good start (there are now fewer shelves for humans to check). Incremental improvement usually beats trying to solve complex problems in one go. My 2c.

bluGill 6y ago
They already have this information from the cash registers though. it isn't up to the second like the system you proposed, but it is "good enough".
- dharmab 6y ago
  Items can run out of stock before hitting the registers- people spent a long time in big department stores like Wal-Mart.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    That doesn't matter, it takes more than an hour to get the replacements on the truck and the truck to walmart anyway. WalMart doesn't store much extra inventory in the back room. Everything comes off the truck and goes right onto the shelf.
- colinmhayes 6y ago
  People steal shit and put shit back in the wrong spot all the time.
  - bluGill 6y ago

yters 6y ago

What if they made Walmart be a giant vending machine, automatically fed with conveyor belts from a warehouse in the back?

tenebrisalietum 6y ago
This might not be true, but I think Walmart makes money by selling shelf space visibility to brands--e.g. General Mills pays Walmart money to have products on an eye-level place on the shelf.
- yters 6y ago
  Or, Walmart can pivot to entirely online delivery shopping and save loads of money by not having stores. Or, Amazon can slide into the groceries space.

bckygldstn 6y ago

There's a few comments asking why this can't be done by subtracting sales from ordered inventory. All large retailers do this, I've worked on this problem, but there are lots of things that reduce the accuracy of the data-driven approach: • Theft • Spoiled/broken products • Customers taking a product then browsing for another hour before checking out • Customers buying multiple flavours of a product with the same price but different UPCs, which the cashier rings up by scanning the first product then hitting "times 10" • There is stock on the shelf, but it's hidden behind something else or out of reach • There is stock in the store, but not on the shelf (many retailers don't track backroom → shelf stocking) • Product is stocked in multiple locations in the store, one of which is empty • Plus all the usual data issues caused by wrong barcode scanned, data entry error, out-of-date information about units per box, etc Those issues are all small, but still significant: • For slow-moving products, being a few units off can mean the difference between out of stock and 1 month stock remaining. • Even for fast-moving products these errors add up over time, you never really get a ground-truth event to reset the error drift. Stocktake and out-of-stock help but are infrequent and not a perfect reflection of reality. There's a big unsexy industry working on this problem with data and human checks. The economics of robots, drones, smart shelves, and smart carts don't seem competitive right now. When you have 10k stores in the US, the expense is massive.

ictebres 6y ago
> Customers buying multiple flavours of a product with the same price but different UPCs, which the cashier rings up by scanning the first product then hitting "times 10" I worked at retail (Uniqlo to be specific) and it was definetely a rule to not do this. They wanted us to scan everything one by one even if they were the same color and size. This allowed for a pretty accurate information on stock, e.g. we could see how many of a given sweater in given size and color is still in storage etc. Probably this is too tedius for some retail (groceries with very small unit price) but very smart rule in general.
- rurp 6y ago
  The rule is probably on the books at most retail stores, getting everyone to follow it all the time though is another matter. Cashiers and their direct supervisors could easily not understand or care about the rule and ignore it to save a few seconds on big orders.

jelliclesfarm 6y ago

I heard someone speak of the Bosso Nova at Walmart at a presentation and most of it was off record. They were reluctant to be open about the Walmart robots. From what I heard/saw I figured there was something more because what it seemed to be achieving was very low hanging fruit. Walmart is notorious for cutting costs and keeping prices low for shoppers and a razor thin profit margin. Their real strength is their supply chain and I have tremendous respect for what Walmart does...and I don’t think anyone matches Walmart when it comes to supply chain management. I heard even amazon’s best are from Walmart. Having said that..I could see no way Bossa Nova bots were compatible with Walmart principles. IMO, they should all pivot and work on autonomous Ag bots. Unlike warehouses, there are multiple environments and multiple problems to solve in Ag. And it’s under explored and under developed. I remember thinking that this(walmart bots) is similar to Ag robotics. Robotics and automation companies coming up with a solution first and then hope that they can define the problem later. They are creating solutions for problems that don’t exist in the first place.

pletsch 6y ago

During my gap year, I ran the backroom at a local Wal-Mart. While I was there, we switched to a new fulfillment system that involved putting all of the stocking responsibilities on one team, instead of spreading it between departments. The problem isn't the technology, it's the physical amount of product coming in compared to man hours. A typical 8hr shift would look like: - 3hrs to unload the general merch delivery truck. An hour to unload the two freezer/cooler that would arrive at some point throughout the shift - 1hr30m of breaks - 1hr setup for night shift - 1hr of 'picks', which was stock we had in the backroom that the system said could go out. This doesn't include the actual stocking of said items That leaves 1hr30m to unload all the stock from the trucks, which doesn't happen. Even if these robots were in my store and could tell me for certain that products needed to be reshelved, the man power isn't there to do it. It ends up being that all the teams achieve their department goals except for the fulfillment team that gets killed. edit: formatting

Simulacra 6y ago

I’m surprised that these were able to last as long as they did without human interference and damage. I assumed generally that these robots would not last due to humans messing with them.

credit_guy 6y ago

I see an emerging consensus here on HN that automating retail is a hard thing to do. Somehow though, Amazon Go just works. No robots, just cameras and machine learning. It just seems to me Amazon is able to do this and Walmart isn't. For now. My bet is that 15 years from now it's going to be as common as an iPhone now (remember how common was an iPhone in 2005? not very...)

julienb_sea 6y ago
To be fair Amazon Go also doesn't use robots for any sort of inventory management. They literally have humans go around the store as needed, based on information collected by the cameras & tracking systems.