Walmart Fields Robot Army To Inventory And Re-Stock Shelves

We checked out the expanded program at a Walmart location in Burbank. Customers there will see a robot in the aisles with bright lights and cameras on it. The autonomous bots propel themselves down the aisles one by one, avoiding human shoppers as they do their work.

“[There are] 150,000 products in a store – it can scan all of them in a typical day,” explained Martin Hitch, Chief Business Officer at Bossa Nova Robotics, the company that makes the robots.

After an initial test, Walmart is expanding its use of the robots in a larger pilot program at 50 locations nationwide, including several in California.