Walmart’s robot army has arrived
Walmart’s robot army
has arrived
The
last machines to invade people’s space at scale were cars; now, it’s Walmart’s
robots. How’s that going?
[Photo: courtesy Bossa Nova]
For years, Walmart has
been automating its
warehouses with robots that can pack and sort items as they
zoom along conveyor belts. But the company has also slowly been rolling out
robots that roam around store aisles alongside customers, launching in 50 stores in 2017 and
rolling out to 350 in 2019. These bots are designed to scan shelves
looking for items that are out of stock, eliminating a time-intensive chore
that human workers no longer have to do—though workers still have to refill the
shelves when the robot finds a missing product.
[Photo: courtesy Bossa Nova]
One thing that Bossa
Nova needed to do was make sure that robots always yielded to people, didn’t
get in their way, and could communicate where they were going so people weren’t
confused. Some designers have put eyes on
robots to indicate direction—humans
are used to observing people’s eyes as a way of understanding in which
direction they plan to go. But Skaff didn’t want to blatantly anthropomorphize
the robot. He wanted it to feel more like a tool than anything else.
“We expected the turn
signals to just work,” Skaff says. “It was a big surprise that actually the
answer is no. People had a hard time transcribing an experience from the road
to one that’s indoors.”
However, it was an apt
comparison to make in another way. The last time that humans had to readjust to
having machines in their space was when the automobile infiltrated the roads at
the turn of the century. And back when cars were first coexisting with humans,
their designers hadn’t yet found a common interaction language. There were no
turn signals or even brake lights. It’s a remarkable echo of what’s happening
now with robots being introduced in public spaces.
Dan Albert, a car
historian and author of the new book Are We
There Yet?, points out that well into the 1950s, people still put
their hands out the window to signal which direction they planned to turn.
Other cars were equipped with a little flag called a
“trafficator” that popped out from the side of the vehicle to
indicate left or right. Brake lights weren’t always what we’re familiar with
today, either; even the use of red, yellow, and green in traffic lights wasn’t
a foregone conclusion. “All those things are very random,” Albert says. “Every
engineer thinks, I’ll do it this way.”
Skaff thinks that’s
something Bossa Nova needs to take responsibility for encouraging. “Pioneering
companies owe it to society to figure out the right convention for the way
robots express intent and indicate presence,” Skaff says. “We should figure out
the right way of doing it through experimentation and standardize it so people
don’t have to learn how to interpret different robots.”
The standardization of
robot interaction design can also learn from the mistakes of urban designers:
Our world today was built to accommodate the car, not people (something that
cyclists and pedestrians are now paying for with their lives).
Albert points to how some robots in factories today have flashing lights or
loud beeping noises similar to when trucks back up as a warning for humans to
stay away. It’s an example of this older way of thinking: “A flashing yellow
light requires human beings to adapt to the robot,” he says, which he views as
a failure of the robot’s engineers. Flashing lights aside, a robot shouldn’t be
requiring humans to get out of its way to avoid injury—it should be getting out
of theirs.
That’s certainly Bossa
Nova’s goal: Its shelf scanners don’t get their own special lane in Walmart
stores where people know to stay away. Instead, they’re integrated right into
the aisle with shoppers—who aren’t always
happy with the change. Neither are workers, who, as The Washington Post reports, are
beginning to feel like machines themselves, especially given growing fears of how
automation will put Americans out of work.
Ultimately,
Bossa Nova’s team ditched the idea of turn signals in favor of a rotating ring
of light. Skaff says the company is still testing out this ring as an
indication of direction—yet another experiment for Walmart’s massive robot test
kitchen.
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