Day 1543 – The Robots Are Coming! – Ask Gramps
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Welcome to Day 1543 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me. This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to WisdomThe Robots Are Coming – Ask GrampsWisdom - the final...
show moreTo keep with our theme of “Ask Gramps,” I will put our weekly topics in the form of a question to get us on track. This week’s question is - “Hey Gramps, there has been robotics used in factories for years helping to streamline manufacturing. How soon will robotics be a major impact in the retail sector?”
The Robots Are Coming!
For our episode today, I am using some information from Peter Diamandis’s blog and newly released book “The Future is Faster Than You Think.”
The robots are coming! On our sidewalks, in our skies, in our every store… Over the next decade, robots will enter the mainstream of retail. The numbers back it up: in the last eight years, the global retail robotics market is projected to grow by order of magnitude, from $4.78 billion in 2018 to $41.67 billion in 2026.
As countless robots work behind the scenes to stock shelves, serve customers, and deliver products to our doorstep, the speed of retail will continue to increase. These changes were already underway, and the pandemic has accelerated them.
Let’s dive in...
Robot DeliveryOn August 3rd, 2016, Domino’s Pizza introduced the Domino’s Robotic Unit, or “DRU” for short. The first home delivery pizza robot, the DRU looks like a cross between R2-D2 and an oversized microwave.
LIDAR and GPS sensors help it navigate, while temperature sensors keep hot food hot and cold food cold. Now called “DOM” (which is also the name of Domino’s chatbot for placing orders), the robot has been undergoing trial runs in ten countries, including New Zealand, France, and Germany. The August 2016 debut was critical, as it was the first time we’d seen robotic home delivery. It won’t be the last. A dozen or so different delivery bots are fast entering the market.
Starship Technologies, for instance, a startup created by Skype founders Janus Friis and Ahti Heinla, has a general-purpose home delivery robot. Right now, the system is an array of cameras and GPS sensors. Still, upcoming models will include microphones, speakers, and even the ability to communicate with customers via AI-driven natural language processing. Since 2016, Starship has already carried out 500,000 deliveries across more than 20 countries.
Along similar lines, Nuro—co-founded by Jiajun Zhu, one of the engineers who helped develop Google’s self-driving car—has a miniature self-driving car of its own. Half the sedan’s size, the Nuro looks like a toaster on wheels, except with a mission. This toaster was designed to carry cargo—originally about 12 bags of groceries — which it has been doing for select Kroger stores since 2018. Two years later, the company has a new...
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Author | Harold Guthrie Chamberlain III |
Organization | Harold Guthrie Chamberlain III |
Website | - |
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