Walmart has officially given the axe to a slew of robots that were employed in its stores to monitor inventory. The bots, provided through a contract with Bossa Nova Robotics, would autonomously roam the aisles of Walmart stores and scan the shelves to check that items hadn’t run out. However, since the pandemic has seen most shoppers transition to conducting their business online, Walmart found that its human workers were perusing the shelves to collect items for online orders as often as the robots were.
The workers, therefore, could easily monitor inventory on the shelves as they were putting together online orders, eliminating the need for robots to do so. The robots were reportedly in use in about 500 Walmart shopping centers across the U.S. “We will continue testing new technologies and investing in our own processes and apps to best understand and track our inventory and help move products to our shelves as quickly as we can,” a Walmart spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal.
