To keep the shelves at Walmart stocked, you need a worker with a barcode scanner and a lot of patience. Or, you could just get a robot. Walmart recently unleashed a six-foot-tall robot from a company called Bossa Nova into their aisles. The robot blasts the aisles with light and takes pictures. In two minutes, it can image 80 feet of the aisle, capturing two terabytes of raw data scanning a 100,000-square-foot-plus store, writes Wired. It is one of the first truly intelligent robots to work alongside humans in a complex way that is not inside a factory. Navigating a store is hard enough as a human, but for a machine, it’s even harder. The robot has to be able to autonomously roam the aisles but also dodge workers and avoid customers who suddenly stop or pivot, dragging their carts with them. Bossa Nova’s robot handles this with a lidar, meaning it sprays the world with lasers to build a map, according to Wired. It takes pictures of the aisles with 2D and 3D cameras. For now, it cannot stock the shelves for the humans, because manipulation is a huge challenge in robotics. But maybe someday.
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