The Robot In Aisle 5 Isn't Stalking You. It Promises.

The technical specifications for a developing a supermarket robot are more challenging than for roaming Mars (where shoppers' personal space is less likely to be an issue...) JL

Kate King reports in the Wall Street Journal:

Robots are also starting to cruise retail-store aisles, and they’ve had to learn to make way for humans. Engineers spent years building a robot that could roam grocery-store aisles counting soup cans and scanning for spills while dodging shopping carts. The company developed “anti-creep” software that lets Marty pass people who are stopped or moving short distances, thereby respecting personal space. The goal is for retail robots to be accepted and overlooked. “The last thing you want is this 6-foot mechanical thing sneaking up on someone buying cat food.”

Andy Callahan and his fellow engineers spent years building a robot that could roam grocery-store aisles counting soup cans and scanning for spills while dodging shopping carts. They named it Marty.

When a worker at a Giant supermarket in Harrisburg, Pa., stuck googly eyes on one of the robots, the engineers rolled their eyes. “We built this sophisticated piece of hardware,” says Mr. Callahan, a system architect for Badger Technologies of Nicholasville, Ky. “It just seems like it cheapens the whole thing.”

Then he noticed children waving and running up to Marty, which resembles a 6-foot-3-inch-tall upside-down hammer with blue flashing lights. He realized the humanizing touch addressed a need engineers hadn’t fully anticipated: helping skeptical shoppers feel comfortable with an automaton.

The googly eyes helped give Marty a personality and endear him to shoppers’ children, says Ashley Flower, a spokeswoman for Giant Food Stores LLC, part of Ahold Delhaize USA. Badger Technologies sells the robot to other retailers, too, with each free to pick its own robot name.

Warehouse and factory employees have worked alongside robots for decades. Homeowners unleash Roomba automated vacuums on dust bunnies. Robots and drones have started rolling down sidewalks and buzzing backyards as tech companies experiment with using them for delivery.

Robots are also starting to cruise retail-store aisles, and they’ve had to learn to make way for humans.

Badger Technologies says it has deployed 506 robots to grocers in nine states over the last year, including at Giant and Stop & Shop Supermarket Co. stores. “Overall people really like Marty and understand it,” says President Gordon Reid of Stop & Shop, another Ahold chain that uses the Marty name.

Bossa Nova Robotics Inc. of San Francisco has a similar robot in 350 Walmart Inc. stores and plans to roll out 650 more by summer. Its robot scans shelves to see which products are missing but doesn’t have arms, so humans do the restocking.

Simbe Robotics Inc. in San Francisco says its robot named Tally—it looks like a white Roomba topped with a tall, slender rectangular platform—is in more than 100 retail stores world-wide, including Midwestern grocer Schnuck Markets Inc. and the global sporting-goods brand Decathlon.

A Walmart spokesman declined to comment. Schnuck and Decathlon representatives say Tally takes over the task of inventorying store shelves so employees can spend more time helping customers.

Maya Kaczor, 23, says she was taken aback when she first encountered Marty in a produce section last summer. “I almost walked right into it, and it’s a 6-foot-tall thing with googly eyes,” says Ms. Kaczor, who lives in Woodland Park, N.J., and works in publishing. “I was initially terrified it would run over my foot or something.”

She avoids Marty, which she calls a “weird gray cylinder roaming around.”

Yvonne Bento, who works in the prepared-food section of a Stop & Shop in Somerset, Mass., says: “If it’s a busy, busy Saturday and a storm is coming, the robot gets in people’s way and people get aggravated with it.”

Robots can face a bit of bullying, says Bossa Nova co-founder Martin Hitch. “We’ve watched a person swing a full bag of groceries and hit it,” he says, but most shoppers ignore it.

Marty’s eyes and name help customers feel more comfortable around the 140-pound robot as it circles stores reporting spills and other potential hazards for cleanup, says Badger Technologies Chief Executive Tim Rowland.

Still, some shoppers have complained Marty was following them. Badger engineers had designed the robot to halt when a shopper got too close and start again when the person moved away. That made sense in the lab; in the store, a slowly browsing customer might feel tailed by the stopping-and-starting robot.

The company developed “anti-creep” software that lets Marty pass people who are stopped or moving short distances, thereby respecting personal space.

Engineers changed the robot’s voice—“Caution! Hazard detected!” it says—to female from male, which was deemed too harsh. The robot’s soft whir was hard to hear over the grocery-store din, so they added a “boop, boop” sound similar to a checkout-line scanner’s.

“The last thing you want,” says Mr. Rowland, “is this 6-foot mechanical thing sneaking up on someone buying cat food.”

Marty developed a following, with people posting videos and children dragging parents over to look. “We recently had a request for Marty to escort a customer to their winter formal,” says Giant’s Ms. Flower. “Marty was working that night so he couldn’t make the event, but sent his regards.”

Kristen Flanagan, a deli manager and union steward at a Stop & Shop in Somerset, Mass., says Marty could cost human jobs, adding: “Supermarkets were meant for people to interact with people and serve people.”

Stop & Shop spokeswoman Jennifer Brogan says Marty isn’t taking away jobs from workers and is designed to help them spend more time aiding customers.

Guy Hoffman, an assistant professor at Cornell University’s Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, has studied human-robot interaction for 16 years and says technology isn’t close to replacing human contact. Understanding how a person is feeling involves social context and body language, he says, and artificial intelligence isn’t there yet.

“Developing robotic technology for human spaces,” he says, “is a much, much harder problem than navigating on Mars in some ways.”

One person browsing a supermarket aisle might feel hurried by a slow-moving robot, he says, while a hurried shopper might deem the robot to be in the way.

Simbe Robotics engineers built Tally to be as unobtrusive as possible, says CEO Brad Bogolea. Tally’s spinning base lets it take up little space in crowded stores, he says, and its digital panels with eyes look in its direction of travel.

Most shoppers aren’t expecting to see robots, and engineers wanted to make the interaction easy, Mr. Bogolea says: “Tally is really designed as this sort of shy robot.”

Then there is the problem of “uncanny valley,” the observation in robotics that humans find robots more appealing as they get more humanlike—up to a point, after which they seem creepy.

“For the retail robots, we were more concerned about them not looking smarter than reality,” says Sarjoun Skaff, chief technology officer at Bossa Nova. “Anthropomorphic features such as eyes may project a higher level of intelligence and draw attention.”

The goal is for retail robots to be accepted and eventually overlooked, he says: “The robot’s job is to take pictures of products on shelves, and it’s not to sit around and chit-chat.”