LoweBot

http://www.lowesinnovationlabs.com/lowebot

by adenadel • 10 years ago

101 35 10 years ago

asimuvPR• 10 years ago

Some observations:

- The ground clearance might pose a problem in a hardware store. Every time I visit a Lowes or Home Depot the floors have debris. Some aisles will have products scattered on the floor (the screws/bolts/nuts aisle specially).

- Ever try to use a touchscreen with dirty hands?

- It will probably be used more by management to keep track of inventory. This I figure is the biggest benefit. Having the robot scan the store could potentially lower the amount of personnel required to do inventory counts.

I'm excited about this. It might seem like a kiosk on wheels but could open up potential advancement/business opportunities once people get used to them. A lot of people still perceive robots as "evil".

hga2• 10 years ago

The ground clearance might pose a problem in a hardware store. Every time I visit a Lowes or Home Depot the floors have debris. Some aisles will have products scattered on the floor (the screws/bolts/nuts aisle specially).

This would seem to depend on the store, I've been spending a lot of time at each since I bought a house built in 1910 in late May, and that doesn't describe either of the ones I've been visiting (in Joplin, MO).

A store that wants a LoweBot to succeed, or one picked to get one, would in theory try to make sure this is generally true, on the other hand, creating floor debris would be a way for the staff to throw a monkey-wrench into a deployment.

Jack000• 10 years ago

this should be pretty easily solved with a forward/downward facing depth sensor (to identify and avoid the debris). The fact that they didn't do this says to me that debris may not have been a major problem in testing.

KC8ZKF• 10 years ago

Stick a broom up their ass, and they can sweep the floor at the same time.

ourmandave• 10 years ago

Aw, it's C-3P-Lowe.

Questions for the Designers...

- In that awkward "will there be anything else?" moment, after it's led me to the hard-to-find screws, what font size will the "fuck off" button have?

- Is it going to hover just off-camera, watching me with TSA level scanners, to make sure any screws don't go "missing"?

- Couldn't this be replaced with an In-store Map app I'll never download? (Unless the paint section is a Pokemon Stop.)

- Where's the off switch?

evan_• 10 years ago

Lobot would have been the better Star Wars reference.

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Lobot

koolba• 10 years ago

I get the marketing/publicity angle of this, but there's no way this is cheaper than hiring an actual person. At least for the part of interacting with customers.

Furthermore, LoweBot is able to assist with inventory monitoring in real-time, which help detect patterns that will able to guide future business decisions.

This sounds interesting. Having an army of robots marching down the aisles and scanning inventory seems useful. Wouldn't be as accurate as a human checking behind a box or finding mislabeled merchandise but would probably be more than an 80/20 solution to the problem.

IanCal• 10 years ago

there's no way this is cheaper than hiring an actual person.

I'm not so sure. People are pretty expensive.

Lowes are open 6am to 10pm 5 days a week and 8-8 on the weekends. That's 104 hours per week, or ~5400 hours per year.

10% downtime and you're still looking at 5000 hours per year.

Google suggests sales associates get $11.70/hour. If you add on maybe 20-30% overhead for all the associated hiring costs, taxes and extra management needed the equivalent cost would be around $75k/year. I expect the true figure would be higher.

How much are these bots? They seem to be reasonably generic, but let's say a 5 year total cost is $200k, does that sound reasonable? That's around half the cost of a real person, so if each can replace about half of a person then that's a good deal.

And that all relies on what I think are fairly low overheads, a reasonable amount of downtime for the bots, quite a high price for the bot itself and an assumption that the bots can't do anything extra that saves time (the inventory scanning for example, or collecting more useful information).

At the very least, I don't think this is obviously much more expensive, and depending on a few factors could easily be much cheaper than a real person.

shalmanese• 10 years ago

Furthermore, the relevant metric isn't current price, it's the price at the time these get deployed at scale which, for a giant company, is at least 3 - 5 years.

Large companies can afford to absorb many millions of dollars worth of losses for pilot projects because the learnings have the potential to far outweigh the losses. Even if each of these robots cost a million bucks a piece, if one robot can help Lowes learn something that reduces the cost of future robots by $100, spread across a 10,000 robot deployment, that robot has paid for itself.

edwhitesell• 10 years ago

there's no way this is cheaper than hiring an actual person.

They've got to try something. Staff has been noticably cut in both local Lowe's in my area over the past few years. It's still far better than Home Depot, but takes time to find help when you actually need it.

mabbo• 10 years ago

'Cheaper' is an interesting word.

This is high capital cost purchase to reduce variable costs. Expensive to buy compared to the costs of hiring an employee, but (I would assume) low cost to maintain, and runs at all hours (so it partially replaces multiple employees).

It's not a question of whether it will pay off, but in how much time. If the answer is 20 years, it's not worth the cost. If the answer is 3 weeks, every store will have them in the next six months.

dexterdog3• 10 years ago

I would think it would be cheaper to have a network of work-from-home experts for each department. Put a kiosk robot that video chats to a real person who can drive the bot to walk with the person around the department and answer real questions like a person. Employees could server all stores at once like a call center. Eventually you can add automation to the process so that the easy questions are answered by code.

protomyth3• 10 years ago

This is would be a fun startup. Build standard teleconferencing bots with some specialized appendages and then act as a clearing house and broker for talent to use the bots in a business / retail setting.

codecamper• 10 years ago

ex ter min ate! ex ter min ate!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxD-5z_xHBU

aaronharder• 10 years ago

Why not just an app? Cheaper, and no scarcity issues: one for every customer.

chillydawg• 10 years ago

I think there are different segments of the market here. Personally, I'd quite like to be led to the drill bits by a robot. Having a little map pop up on my phone via AR would be 99% as good, though, sure.

joshontheweb• 10 years ago

This. I always find myself a bit frustrated when shopping that I can't just open an app and see a map of the location of the item I want. A robot for this seems like overkill. I suppose it is probably just as much for marketing.

mrfusion• 10 years ago

Or screens or kiosks around the store.

billhathaway• 10 years ago

Lowes does have an app with in-store maps. When you search you can see product inventory and where items are located in the store. I've used it a few times with moderate success. It only has 25 reviews on App Store with 2/5 rating, so that might be lowering adoption. For comparison the Home Depot app has 186 reviews with 4/5 stars.

randallsquared• 10 years ago

Sadly, the employees apparently shuffle things around for local reasons and the app doesn't get updated. The employees will then badmouth the app to customers (well, one customer, at least...). "Oh, the app? Yeah, that's wrong a lot... We actually put that item over there at the end of that other aisle, because we wanted to put other-item here instead."

ape4• 10 years ago

People are great at vague queries... where can I get the thing that goes up and down in the back of a toilet?

Avshalom• 10 years ago

My favorite request: "I'm looking for things that are owls"

defen• 10 years ago

What was that person trying to find? Dowels? Awls?

corpus• 10 years ago

I'm often curious how far Google has gotten in answering vague questions like this.

Google's answer is pretty reasonable in this case:

Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=where+can+I+get+the+thing+th...

=> First result [Parts of a Toilet | The Family Handyman]

Compare to Bing, which misses the point:

Bing: http://www.bing.com/search?q=where%20can%20I%20get%20the%20t...

=> First result [Signs Of A Sewer Drain Clog]

Pxtl• 10 years ago

If I ask lowebot for help, does that make me lando calrisian?

jvandonsel• 10 years ago

How is their localization and navigation done? Visual? GPS?

radiorental• 10 years ago

initially with SLAM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_and_...

LoweBot

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