Walmart unveils grocery-shopping robots – Business Insider

Walmart will soon start
using robots to pick and pack shoppers’ online grocery
orders.
Getty/Rick T.
Wilking

• Walmart
  will soon start using automated robotic carts to pick and pack
  shoppers’ online grocery orders. 
• The company is building a 20,000-square-foot extension
  to one of its stores in Salem, New Hampshire, that will house
  the carts and hundreds of products. 
• The new system is designed to give Walmart employees
  more time to focus on service and selling, while shifting the
  more “mundane, repeatable tasks” onto the robots.

Walmart
will soon start using robots to pick and pack shoppers’ online
grocery orders. 

The company is building a 20,000-square-foot extension to one of
its stores in Salem, New Hampshire, that will house robotic
grocery carts and hundreds of products. 

The automated carts will rapidly pick and pack products according
to customers’ orders, then deliver the goods to one of four
stations where Walmart employees will finish assembling the
orders. 

“The vast majority of grocery products we offer in-store
will be fulfilled through this system, though our personal
shoppers will still handpick produce and other fresh
items,” Mark Ibbotson, Walmart US executive vice president
of central operations, wrote in a blog
post.

Walmart developed the system, which it’s calling Alphabot, in
partnership with Massachusetts-based Alert
Innovation.

Ibbotson said the new system is designed to give Walmart
employees more time to focus on service and selling while
shifting the more “mundane, repeatable tasks” onto the
robots.

“Although this is a small pilot, we expect big things from
it,” he wrote. “We have a lot to learn about this new technology,
and we’re excited about the possibilities of how we can use it to
make the future of shopping — and working — even better.”

Walmart’s new program follows Kroger’s
announcement in May that it is
partnering with Ocado, a
UK-based online supermarket, that has robots with the ability to
pack a 50-item grocery order in a matter of minutes.

As part of the agreement, Ocado will help Kroger build at least
20 of its futuristic, robot-powered warehouses in the US.