As reported throughout the U.S. robotics industry, Walmart cut its partnership with fledgling automation vendor Bossa Nova, whose robots provide inventory tracking for Walmart stores as well as offering a range of broadly termed “value-added services” through the use of creating planograms for optimizing stock. The stated rationale was that humans were perfectly able to do stock keeping and inventory to the level Walmart required. There are suggestions that Walmart was concerned about human-robot interaction and the customer experience.
The year 2020 has been a challenging year for retailers, and many are rethinking their technology roadmaps in the wake of the virus. The Walmart/Bossa Nova project was limited, being rolled out in 7% of Walmart’s stores. While the plan was to deploy 1,000 systems, around 500 were actually deployed. Bossa Nova is the latest in the line of vendors that have entered what has derogatively been called the Walmart technology graveyard, another example being the machine vision vendor Everseen.
A Snapshot of the Competitive Landscape
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IMPACT
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While Bossa Nova has suffered, there are a number of competitors that are still thriving in the inventory tracking space. Simbe Robotics is the developer of Tally, a robot that also tracks inventory and develops analytics to help automate and improve stock keeping. Unlike Bossa Nova, Simbe’s deployments are with customers who utilize them for 60% of their stores, with 62 deployed at stores owned by Schnucks, an American grocer. As a result, any positive effect they have is likely to have a larger impact.
Badger Technologies is another vendor, born out pharmacy giant Lexmark and now owned by Jabil. The company has deployed robots in Ahold Delhaize USA, Stop & Shop, Giant, and Woodman’s Markets; have deployed 20 robots in Woolworths (Australia); and had evaluation at Walmart stores. The company currently has 520 robots operating mainly in the northeast of the United States, and these products have collectively travelled more than 350,000 miles.
Like other inspection robots, the tasks of Badger Technologies include:
- Price check and validation
- Out of stock checking and product location
- Planogram compliance
- Health and safety check
Over the course of an average workday, a Badger robot might be scanning for 9 to 12 hours a day. The company is focusing on improving the current solution, with immediate improvements being the introduction of RFID for scanning, improved analytics, and improved redundancy with fixed camera systems. The research arm of the company is also looking to develop the machine vision solution to measure freshness and track humans in store. There is also some interest in developing the Badger system as a security robot, which involves integrating other IoT sensors related to measuring gas into the robot. This would put it in direct competition with dedicated security robot companies like Cobalt Robotics and Knightscope.
Like Bossa Nova, Badger Technologies is in the nascent stages of testing out its system, but the fact that it has developed a wider portfolio of end users makes the company more resilient to sudden changes. Nonetheless, Badger also understands that it may have to redeploy its technology stack away from inventory tracking and towards more popular use cases like material handling or scrubbing.
Automated Data Collection Going Forward
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RECOMMENDATIONS
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The separation is a setback, but Walmart is still employing automation and partnering with robotics vendors. Even now, Walmart is working with an undisclosed AMR developer in Europe for material handling, and still utilizes autonomous scrubbers. While some have pointed to Walmart as the culprit, as a company that ultimately proves a bad partner to technology companies, the truth is more nuanced.
As a major retailer, Walmart offers a huge test case for robotics vendors. And it has placed considerable resources in developing automation companies. The automation vendors, who in many cases do not have their profitability value fully in place, rely heavily on pilots from companies like Walmart to market their products. This lopsided relationship often means that Walmart can demand a lower charge than would be needed for the company to raise sufficient funds. In too many cases, the vendor needs Walmart as a case study more than Walmart needs the vendor to solve a problem.
In the final analysis, the end user decides the success of the commercial robotics industry, not the vendor. The history of technology is replete with products that the vendors loved but failed because they were not built around the needs of the customer. Many technologists are under the assumption that adoption and progress are down primarily to the interaction between big technological advancements and price reductions. However, in reality, success for robotics depends on convincing end users that the pain of adoption is lower than the cost of inaction. This requires validating the business case and making sure that the outputs of data collection are timely and actionable. With Walmart’s dismissal of Bossa Nova, ABI Research believes that the robotics industry is being further disciplined and must respond with a stronger focus on the end user.
