Clean up in Aisle 7!
Yesterday evening in the grocery store aisle, I found myself at an impasse as another individual and myself both tried to give the other the right of way, a humorous human moment that almost everyone experiences from time to time. What was different in this case was that this was a robot.
His name is Marty, an autonomous robot designed to detect spills and hazards on the store floor. Ultimately our face-off ended when I realized that his LIDAR sensors probably wouldn’t allow him to proceed while I was standing in the way, and I continued about my shopping.
Badger Technologies based in Nicholasville, Kentucky is the creator of Marty, which is just one brand of autonomous robot being designed to help with store cleanup and stocking. And as the company signed deals to roll out the robot to nearly 500 Giant, Martin’s, and Stop and Shop stores in the U.S., my experience is undoubtedly becoming an increasingly common one.
With the robot’s skill repertoire limited to essentially yelling for help once it’s found a spill, their utility leaves something to desire. However, newer versions are able to use UPC scanners and other sensors to monitor stock levels which could have the ability to improve customers’ experience. A whitepaper from Badger suggests that “8% of items regularly stocked in a large supermarket were [out of stock] on any given day”, excluding fresh and frozen sections. Coupled with the reduction in manual labor required to perform these audits, the company suggests the robots could offer significant savings:
Copyright © 2020 Badger Technologies, LLC
Similarly, Walmart expanded its use of robots to more than 300 stores to control labor costs in inventory management and floor-cleaning. Badger technologies insists that their devices are not intended to replace any full-time jobs but increase the efficiency of their human counterparts by freeing up their time to more directly interface with customers, though the advent of self checkout terminals has not had the same effect.
So there is some utility to offset the awkwardness of encountering a robot in the grocery store aisle, but could there be other potential applications for autonomous assistance? London-based BotsAndUs assert that in addition to retail, there is a strong case for travel assistance. Their investors Kindred Capital and Capnamic Ventures seem to agree after the company announced a $2.5m seed round last week, bringing their total funding to $6m.
The company’s flagship product, Bo, is a 60kg robot designed to perform a litany of functions including traveler assistance and interaction in multiple languages, monitoring foot traffic to optimize layouts and staff deployment, and detecting spills and other hazards.
COMPANY PROFILE
Name: BotsAndUs
Founded: 2015
Funding Stage: Seed ($2.5m JUL2020)
Total Funding: $6m
Employees: 11-50
BRIEF: BotsAndUs looks to capture a share of the retail autonomous market, and expand to additional verticals including travel. Their focus on the omnichannel - providing the same retail experience regardless of whether they're shopping online from a desktop or mobile device, by telephone, or in a brick-and-mortar store - comes from the understanding that the retail shopping experience is often aided by use of a smartphone. BotsAndUs seeks to utilize store metadata to optimize the in-store retail experience and provide more bespoke solutions for new applications.
The bottom line:
BotsAndUs is a company that seems to have a strong view of the future of retail and travel and is working to provide solutions tailored to that vision. Autonomous assistance is increasingly common and due to ROI in terms of cost savings, seems to be the path forward for many retail operations. BotsAndUs is poised to become the market leader of autonomous travel assistance, providing strong investor upside as they capture a new market. If they are able to properly moat this vertical they could potentially see incredible growth in the near term as they sign more contracts to manage airports & travel hubs.
