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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Bossa Nova

Walmart Boosts Bossa Nova’s Robotic Shelf Scanning to 1,000 Stores

Walmart is adding another 650 Bossa Nova robots to its roster, Bloomberg reported this morning, bringing the total number of the shelf scanning bots to 1,000 by the end of this summer.

Boss Nova’s robots are autonomous, six-foot tall machines equipped with 15 different cameras. As they move down a store aisle, they scan for missing or misplaced inventory and alert store management to take proper action.

The move is part of a bigger robotic push Walmart is embarking on. In April of last year, the company made its initial increase in Bossa Nova’s robots and also put Bain’s floor scrubbing robots in 1,500 locations and doubled the use of automated scan and sort robots to 600 locations.

In November of last year, Bossa Nova announced the newest version of its robot. The Bossa Nova 2020 features a slimmer design, smarter cameras that can see deeper into shelves and a number of attachments to scan other areas of the store like frozen food and produce sections.

When Walmart first started rolling out Bossa Nova’s robots in October of 2017, the retailer said the automated shelf scanners were 50 percent more productive and three times faster than a human doing the same job. Walmart didn’t provide Bloomberg with any update on productivity stats, saying only that they have reduced out-of-stock products.

There will be more robots running around your local grocery store over the next year. In addition to Boss Nova, there is Simbe Robotics, which has a deal with Giant Eagle stores, and which raised $26 million in September of last year.

Of course, there is the whole question of whether robots are just a stop gap for automated inventory management. Walmart launched its Intelligent Retail Lab store last year, which uses banks of cameras to monitor inventory in real time. And Singapore startup Trax says that its camera-based inventory management system has increased sales for its retail partners by one percent. One percent on its own doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you operate at the scale of a national chain, that one percent can translate into sizeable revenue that is just sitting on the table.

Bossa Nova is aware of this potential shift away from robots. When I spoke with the company last year , they said that what they are most interested in is the data, no matter where it comes from: robots, cameras, smart shelves — whatever.

But until those days come, expect more stores to do more with robots like Bossa Nova’s.

Bossa Nova Unveils New Shelf-Scanning Robot with Fresh Food Inventory Monitoring

Bossa Nova today announced its next-generation of shelf-scanning robot dubbed, appropriately enough, the Bossa Nova 2020, which will make its debut at the National Retail Federation show this coming January.

Bossa Nova’s robot roams store aisles, scanning shelves as it goes to identify any gaps in the inventory so retailers can keep items fully stocked. It does this through a combination of shelf barcode reading, to know what items should be where, as well as computer vision to identify products.

The Bossa Nova 2020 features a smarter camera than the previous version that can see deeper into the shelf, and a lot more computing power. “We dramatically upgraded the onboard edge computing,” Sarjoun Skaff, CTO of Bossa Nova told me by phone this week. “We built our own computer, consolidating three server-like computers into a single board with four CPUs and three GPUs.”

Images are processed by the camera itself, and information is then handed over to the onboard computer, which sends data up to the cloud where Bossa Nova’s AI takes over to analyze the images and deliver insights to store managers in real time.

In addition to static product boxes on store shelves, with new attachments, the Bossa Nova 2020 can now scan additional sections of the grocery store like produce aisles and frozen food sections. For something like fruit, Bossa nova doesn’t do a complete count of the products, but rather identifies product gaps in displays.

The Bossa Nova 2020 is also thinner than its predecessor, giving humans in aisles more room to move and allowing smaller format stores to use the robot. Skaff also said that they have added controls on the robot itself so store employees can interact directly with the robot on the spot.

Roaming robots are something that shoppers and store employees will increasingly have to deal with. Earlier this year Walmart, which launched first-gen Bossa Novas in 50 locations back in 2017, announced it would expand that fleet to 300 hundred locations. Giant Eagle started testing Simbe’s Tally robot in stores, and Ahold Delhaize said it ordered almost 500 of Badger Technologies “Marty” robots (though those don’t do inventory management).

One thing Skaff said Bossa Nova won’t do, however, is put googley eyes on its robots, saying that while they want the robot to be approachable, they want to convey that it is an appliance, a tool, and not the work of Hollywood sci-fi.

One thing I’ve wondered about this past year is how much of a stopgap robots are when it comes to inventory management. In April, Walmart unveiled it’s AI-powered Intelligent Retail Lab (IRL) store, which uses banks of installed cameras to monitor inventory all the time in real-time (i.e., no waiting for a robot to come down the aisle).

It seem as though this isn’t lost on Bossa Nova. Though the company hasn’t formally changed its name, Bossa Nova Robotics dropped the “Robotics” part entirely in the press release for this latest news, referring to itself only as “Bossa Nova.” Common Sense Robotics did something similar this year when it changed its name to Fabric.

Skaff even talked about how Bossa Nova is looking ahead post-robot. “I think the future will have a mix of a little bit of everything,” Skaff told me. “Some fixed cameras, robots, perhaps even some flying cameras, crowdsourced cameras, smart shelves. All of these are sources of data.”

Because ultimately, data and AI is what Boss Nova is all about. It doesn’t even charge retailers for the robots, instead making money by having clients subscribe to its data analytics platform.

Robots may be futuristic, but the future belongs to those who collect, comprehend and analyze data.

Walmart Broadens Robotic Workforce with More Autonomous Shelf-Scanners and Floor Scrubbers

Walmart appears to be going all-in on robots, as The Wall Street Journal reports today that the retail giant is adding a host of robots to the front and back of more than a thousand of its stores.

A big beneficiary of Walmart’s automation push is Bossa Nova, makers of the shelf-scanning robot, which roams up and down aisles checking inventory levels. The company first launched in roughly 50 Walmart stores back in October of 2017, and that number will now scale up to 300 locations.

Walmart is also deploying autonomous floor scrubbers made by Brain Corp. at 1,500 locations and will double the use of automated systems to scan and sort products coming off of trucks to 600 stores.

When Walmart first started using the shelf-scanning robot, it said that it was interested in using robots for tasks that are “repeatable, predictable, and manual.” The company also added that the shelf-scanning robots were “50 percent more productive than humans” at the job. Walmart told The Journal that this new robot implementation will reduce the amount of time it takes to do those tasks (shelf inventory management, cleaning) and will also cut down on the number of people needed to do them. However, Walmart went on to say that these additional robots will free up the workforce to do other (presumably higher-skilled) tasks, and that the company is hiring on its e-commerce side as it wages a grocery battle with Amazon.

In the coming years, you’ll be just as likely to find a robot in your grocery aisle as you will a radishes. All the major grocery chains are getting into the robot game: Ahold Delhaize just ordered 500 floor roaming robots to spot spills, Albertsons is building out a robotic micro-fulfillment center, and Kroger is expanding its delivery by self-driving car.

For Walmart, this massive robot rollout could be just the tip of the iceberg; the retail giant is also eyeing Flippy as robotic fry cook for its deli, and has received a patent for a robot shopping cart.

While this type of news from Walmart and other grocers will reinforce fears over robots taking all the human jobs, it’s actually more complicated than that. There are some jobs robots are better suited for, and I was speaking with a major grocery retailer earlier this month who said that it’s actually hard to find human workers who want a job in grocery stores these days.

The subject of automation is a tricky one, which is why we are holding our ArticulATE food robot summit next week, on April 16 in San Francisco. We will be chatting about how robots are transforming grocery both in-store and for delivery, and how robots will work alongside with, and yes, even replace some humans. It promises to be a great day of discussion, but tickets are almost gone, so grab yours today!