A face fit for … a robot
Putting a friendly face on automation.
When Tina Sorg first saw the robot rolling through her Giant supermarket in Harrisburg, Pa., she said to herself, “That thing is a little weird.”
Programmed to detect spills and debris in the aisles, the robot looked like an inkjet printer with a long neck.
“It needed personality,” said Sorg, 55, who manages the store’s beer and wine department.
So, during one overnight shift, she went out to a nearby arts and craft store, brought back a large pair of googly eyes and, when no one was looking, affixed them on the top of the robot.
The eyes were a hit with executives at global grocery company Ahold Delhaize, which owns the Giant and Stop & Shop supermarket chains. They are now a standard feature on the company’s nearly 500 robots across the United States.
How this supermarket robot got its goofy eyes touches on a serious question: Will robots with friendly faces and cute names help people feel good about devices that are taking over an increasing amount of human work?
Robots are now working everywhere from factories to living rooms. But the introduction of robots to public settings like the grocery store is fueling new fears that humans are being pushed out of jobs. McKinsey, the consulting firm, says the grocers could immediately reduce “the pool of labor hours” by as much as 65 percent if they adopted all the automation technology available.
“Margin pressure has made automation a requirement, not a choice,” McKinsey said in a report last year.
Retailers said their robot designs were not meant to assuage angst about job losses. Companies of all sizes — from Carrefour in Spain to Schnucks supermarket in St. Louis — are investing in tens of thousands of friendly looking robots that are upending human work.
Most of the retail robots have just enough human qualities to make them appear benign but not too many to suggest they are replacing humans entirely.
“It’s like Mary Poppins,” said Peter Hancock, a professor at the University of Central Florida who has studied the history of automation. “A spoonful of sugar makes the robots go down.”
Perhaps no other retailer is dealing as intensely with the sensitivities around automation as Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer, with about 1.5 million workers. The company spent many months working with the firm Bossa Nova and researchers at Carnegie Mellon University to design a shelf-scanning robot that it hopes employees and customers will feel comfortable with.
This robot was designed without a face because its developers did not want customers to think they could interact with the device. But many of the robots have names, given to them by store staff. Some also wear name badges.
“We want the associates to have an attachment to it and want to protect it,” said Sarjoun Skaff, a co-founder and the chief technology officer at Bossa Nova. Walmart said it planned to deploy the robots in 1,000 stores by the end of the year, up from about 350.
Some robots, the tech companies say, are blending seamlessly into the stores. Walmart and malls operated by the Simon Property Group are using self-driving floor scrubbers that have a steering wheel, a cushy seat and even a cup holder — features that give the impression that these scrubbers are meant for humans settling in for a long shift of floor washing with a coffee at their side. The scrubber can be driven manually to set the routes it will take through the store. Then, a worker needs only to touch a screen, and the device takes off on its own. About 80 percent of the time, there is no human at the wheel.