Is it hoodie proof?
So it can keep itself upright can it?
That'll just be a challenge to the hoodie wearing yoof in my local supermarket.
Or, it'll be tagged with graffiti, or up on blocks with the wheel nicked.
Say hello to mObi, a metre-tall retail-friendly robot that, if developer Bossa Nova Robotics has its way, will be hovering up and down supermarket aisles the world over, checking stock, guiding disoriented punters to the baked beans, and reducing even further the number of employment opportunities open to surly Gen Y-ers. …
Forget that - I wonder if it can deal with:
* The hassles mums trying to shop with a hoard of whining kids.
* The shoppers who merrily abandon their trollies in the middle of the aisles in everyones way whilst they wander off to select the items they want from the other end of the row.
* The cages of new stock left by staff in the busiest of the aisles just to get in everyones way.
* The business type who just popped in for a few things, but hasn't the time to wrench the mobile away from his ear and so is trying to pick things off the shelf with the same hand that's holding their overflowing basket.
If it can please let me know the secret, 'cos I'm damn sure I can't deal with them most days.
If this thing's going to have any chance of replacing the staff in my local Tesco's, they're going to have be sold in pairs and programmed to spend 90% of their time locked in a secure communication protocol with each other, heavily firewalled to prevent any disruption to their comms, such as a hostile "excuse me, can you tell me where the beans are?" attack
You would have thought so, but my local Tescos are useless, no stock of what people want on the selves (always empty almost all the time) and never putting less of what people don't want on the selves to make room for the stuff that flies off.
I assume the stock management software tells them what is going on and the staff actively ignore it. Been like it for years. Or perhaps they just eyeball everything.
Stock control? You're having a laugh.
I've searched the aisle for things, and not found them.
So I go and ask, "do you have....?" Dunno, 'ave ye tried bakery?
So off to customer services, "Can your computer tell me if you even have xyz in stock? So I'm not wasting my time looking?"
"No, it can't do that."
WTF! really!?!
You'd have thought they would have a refined to perfection logistics system by now. I cant speak for the stores but the warehouse I work in is held together with chewing gum and string the only nod to modernism is replacing the old green screen terminals with PC's running terminal emulation.
Nothing in the place is ever repaired if you can make do without and there is no post install support for anything that runs on electric so most of it just dies and get chucked in the corner, which is where these would end up despite being rather impressive.
These are the sort of company's who think a 5 year old lithium-ion cell that has been in 24 hour use is still going to be able to run a mobile terminal and not go from full to flat in an hour.
Retail is where technology goes to die.
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Why the fiddly, and processor intensive, ball and gyros to stay upright? Surely the wheel is now perfected technology - and out of patent... Otherwise they should have used a pogo-stick, or an air-cushion and had it hover properly...
I suppose it's too much to ask for that they use SpaceX's latest technology, the Grasshopper rocket. It would be fun to have a mini rocket bouncing round your supermarket, and it could get to those empty shelves super-quick. But people always laugh at me when I suggest indoor rocketry as the solution to any problem. I can't imagine why...
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"I rather suspect that it'll be easier to keep upright (or even self-right) than a very tall robot on a small wheeled base."
Actually it's best to have the center of gravity as high as possible for balancing as it makes it easier to move the support under center and the added length means the moment of inertia is working in favor of not tipping. You can demonstrate this yourself by trying to balance different length sticks on your finger. A short pencil is particularly hard to balance but a long broomstick is considerably easier. Likewise, if you have a single stick with a weight that can be moved from top to bottom you can notice that it does get easier as the weight is moved up the stick.
Tired consumer. Approached by hovering robot.
Hovering robot: "Do you need any help, Sir? Do you need any help, Sir? Do you need any help, Sir? Do you need any help, Sir?"
Tired consumer: "No thanks"
Hovering robot, insisting: "Do you need any help, Sir? Do you need any help, Sir? Do you need any help, Sir? Do you need any help, Sir? Do you need any help, Sir? Do you need any help, Sir? Do you need any help, Sir? Do you need any help, Sir?"
Tired consumer, very annoyed: "I SAID NO!"
Hovering robot, continuing nevertheless: "Do you need any help, Sir? Do you need any help, Sir? Do you need any help, Sir? Do you need any help, Sir? Do you need any help, Sir? Do you need any help, Sir? Do you need any help, Sir? Do you need any help, Sir?"
Tired consumer, at wits' end: "NOOOOOOOOO!!!"
Hovering robot, completely ignoring consumer: "Do you need any help, Sir? Do you need any help, Sir? Do you need any help, Sir? Do you need any help, Sir? Do you need any help, Sir? Do you need any help, Sir? Do you need any help, Sir? Do you need any help, Sir?"
Tired consumer, surrenders to the inevitable: "OK! You win! I need help. Tell me what to do, I'll buy whatever you say."
Hovering robot, smugly: "That's better, Sir! Follow me now..."
1) To make if hoody proof (i.e. stop if getting walked off with) could it discharge it's batteries through the chassis?
2) IP55 rated maybe? no small kids sticking fingers where they shouldn't or guide dogs taking a piss...
3) if that plate on the top can hold 10kg, why not add a hand basket so it could carry your shopping for you?!
4) teams of them bring your Tesco on-line order to your home? assuming no stairs of course...
1) To make if hoody proof (i.e. stop if getting walked off with) could it discharge it's batteries through the chassis?
Just sounding a nasty alarm when it has been lifted up would be enough. Any store large enough to be able to afford some of these things will also have security staff on the door, too.
2) IP55 rated maybe? no small kids sticking fingers where they shouldn't or guide dogs taking a piss...
How often do you see guide dogs urinating in supermarkets? They're substantially better trained and better behaved than many of the children you'll find there.
I suspect basic shell sealing will be done as a matter of course, if only to keep maintenance down
"[...] and remove the fluff with a toothpick every couple of weeks?"
The real problem with the old mouse balls was that they acquired a felt pad made up of hair, dust, and sticky deposits. This made the ball only rotate in the direction of the accretion. In any other direction the ball stopped turning.
If everything had RFID tags then there'd be no need at all for a mobile robot. The 'readers' are built right in the racks. That's how many large warehouses do it now, including Wal-Mart in the backroom but not on the shelves as the tags are too expensive for the manufacturers to put on every item. The tags are relegated to whole pallets or boxes with many small products inside, mostly.
I know the BOFH has been involved in robot challenges before, but mostly on his own turf. What are the possibilities for a robot ambush (and counter-insurgency) campaign at the local supermarket... Or perhaps a few amendments to the stock management and delivery system.
Presumably with the right access to the control system, there's no reason why these little chaps should consider themselves limited to the supermarket aisles. I'm mean, what if a mischievous rascal felt inclined to 'persuade' the robot to follow customers home. I wonder what the effective range is...
Ohh, oh no, nononono... I know where this is going and it is NOT going to end well...
"All this has happened before. All this will happen again." - It IS true. We are on the brink of having immersive virtual reality glasses (Oculus Rift, Google Glass etc), we have robots like this thing that look EXACTLY like Serge (http://singularityhub.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/serge-housebot.jpg), and meantime there are projects underway to build spaceplanes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_%28spacecraft%29) whose engine technology resembles the engines of every sci-fi atmospheric craft, but mostly those of Vipers and X-Wings...
I am just waiting for Nasa to announce finding the wreck of a giant starship drifting out beyond the Sun, or some archeologist to find the rusted remnants of a dropship style craft buried under Antartica or something, which carbon dating shows to be around 150 millenia old.
Because trust me, we are going to NEED hyperdrives pretty soon, if we keep going the way we are.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_L4RtU1iRg
So it trundles around, gets knocked over by the robot tipping El Reg gang, mains a few small children, blinds some others and even then, all it does it to take photos of the shelves so a human operator can look at the photos and decide if the stock levels are too low?
I mean really, that's pretty shit.
As someone else said earlier, anyone likely to be in the game of requiring such an item already has an inventory system that contains a miraculous thing called "location" and a POS system that magically decreases the "on shop shelf" location as they scan the products.
You'd still need that same system as well as Robbie the Robot.
Better solution - use the damned tools you've already paid for - the same ones you've probably been partially using since the 1970's
Funny how large companies never seem to get a handle on that magical concept.
Partially using being the operative phrase here.
The current stock control tools require the staff to put the stock on the system correctly, then update the system when it's taken from stock room to shelves. In my experience at a medium sized retail chain, this rarely happened in some stores. Admittedly the supermarkets pay better, and use more permanent staff than we did, but it only takes a few staff not doing it right to turn your stock control system into a frustrating excursion into randomness.
I suspect that given the quality of the fleshies they hire, and their perceptions of their own store managers, that robot overlords will appear quite attractive to various retail head offices. I await the laser-armed android store managers with interest. They'll probably have better personalities than most of the human ones anyway...
Not *so* shit.
Given the time it takes SWMBO to get round the supermarket, and assuming she's no better or worse than average, I can see how there's a significant time - 20 or 30 minutes - between the item being removed from the shelf and turning up at till (assuming it *does* turn up and hasn't been silently requisitioned). Plenty of time for it to be out of stock at the shelf.
While I would expect that the prediction software associated with restocking any particular line ought to be pretty robust, having a little hovering robot around the place is more than somewhat cool.
There is also the existing security camera that could easily be purposed to spot and indicate a bare shelf to the folks in the stock room so the fleshy checking to see if those legs go all the way up that short skirt carefully overseeing store security isn't troubled by naked shelf warnings.
At what point is a supermarket out of hours? They're all 24 hours round here.
Even if a supermarket does close, the POS system should say when something is out of stock long before closing time.
This robot is useless for its stated purpose.
m0bi: Hi Babe, Have you worked here long?
Checkout: Beep
m0bi: You know the I love the way the light reflects off your screen
Checkout: Beep
m0bi: And you've got the cutest Pin Pad buttons
Checkout: Beep
m0bi: You're really turning me on now.
Checkout: Unexpected Item in bagging Area
If you could feed ink in between the ball and housing, this would make a great robotic ballpoint pen.
In future I could see this type of technology being rolled out across the nation's highways.
More advanced robots could zoom around road networks autonomously, acting as mobile speed cameras, tax disc and insurance checkers, possibly even doing robotic road repairs, laying down fresh road markings, that kind of thing.
Stick a robot arm or two on it and wouldn't these be useful in warehouses for automating the transfer of items from shelf to despatch?
Even now my mind's eye is hearking back to Quazatron and Spindizzy :)
And Ro-Jaws from Starlord's/2000AD's Robusters/ABC Warriors :)