The big-box retailer on Wednesday unveiled a platform called Alphabot, which it has stealthily been testing at one of its Supercenters in Salem, New Hampshire, since the middle of last year. Walmart says the Salem store will continue to serve as Alphabot’s “home,” while the new picking and packing process is analyzed again and again, and improvement are made. It says it will eventually assess plans for a broader rollout across the U.S.

Walmart on Wednesday unveiled its latest weapon in the battle against Amazon and Kroger for shoppers' food spending: a grocery-picking robot. 

The machine, part of a system called Alphabot, operates in a 20,000 square-foot facility that Walmart built onto one of its stores in Salem, New Hampshire. The company plans to build similar facilities onto stores in Mustang, Oklahoma and Burbank, California this year. 

Automated grocery systems like Alphabot are estimated to pick and pack orders as much as 10 times faster than a human. This could enable Walmart to rapidly expand its capacity for orders as demand for online grocery services grows. 

"Demand for this business continues to grow," Tom Ward, senior vice president of central operations for Walmart, said of the company's online grocery business. "Systems like [Alphabot] allow us to scale enormously."

E-commerce competition among grocery companies will continue to intensify this year, and micro-fulfillment is becoming the technology du jour to boost grocers’ capabilities. With the potential to fill orders faster than the traditional store-pick model while taking up minimal square footage, micro-fulfillment centers (MFCs) have emerged as a popular solution for retailers looking to hit back against the challenging economics of e-commerce. From Walmart’s partnership with Alert Innovation to Takeoff Technologies, here is more information about each micro-fulfillment company.

At first glance, the crops don’t look any different from other crops blanketing the Salinas Valley, in California, which is often called “America’s salad bowl.” All you see are rows and rows of lettuce, broccoli, and cauliflower stretching to the horizon. But then the big orange robots roll through.

The machines are on a search-and-destroy mission. Their target? Weeds. Equipped with tractorlike wheels and an array of cameras and environmental sensors, they drive autonomously up and down the rows of produce, hunting for any leafy green invaders. Rather than spraying herbicides, they deploy a retractable hoe that kills the weeds swiftly and precisely.

The robots belong to FarmWise, a San Francisco startup that wants to use robotics and artificial intelligence to make agriculture more sustainable—and tastier. The company has raised US $14.5 million in a recent funding round, and in 2020 it plans to deploy its first commercial fleet of robots, with more than 10 machines serving farmers in the Salinas Valley.

FarmWise says that although its robots are currently optimized for weeding, future designs will do much more. “Our goal is to become a universal farming platform,” says cofounder and CEO ­Sébastien Boyer. “We want to automate pretty much all tasks from seeding all the way to harvesting.”

Last year was marked by significant geopolitical uncertainty, fragile economic growth and a plethora of technological advances, giving forklift manufacturers, vendors, buyers and end-users significant challenges and opportunities.

Forkliftaction News canvassed a number of industry leaders about the issues they faced in 2019, the changes they witnessed and what this all means for the sector in 2020.

This executive guide to artificial intelligence and automation helps busy business professionals get up to speed on the quick changing world of artificial intelligence.  The opportunities artificial intelligence bring to the business world are immense.  There is much speculation around artificial intelligence but what everyone seems to agree with is that AI will continue to dramatically change the world.

AI will take jobs that once were thought only humans could do.  This is a great quote to understand how quickly things will be changing in less than 10 years.  “Artificial intelligence will reach human levels by around 2029. Follow that out further to, say, 2045, we will have multiplied the intelligence, the human biological machine intelligence of our civilization a billion-fold.” ~Ray Kurzweil.  As AI gets closer and closer to human levels what type of productivity gains will it be able to add achieve in business?

This artificial intelligence guide is broken into categories that are important to the future of business.  The guide starts with a basic explanation of artificial intelligence as well as some quick tutorials for anyone new to AI.  For those that are already up to speed on AI scroll down and click into any of the links to dive into the information.  For detailed tutorials scroll down towards the end of the page.

The world's second-largest fashion retailer has been desperate to automate its warehouse and distribution systems, claiming a severe shortage of manual workers due to Japan's ageing population. Just over a year ago, it pledged to invest 100 billion yen (£700m) in the effort, including revamping the Tokyo warehouse.

But until now, there was still one job the robots had not been able to perform: folding clothes.

NORTH HAVEN, CONN. -- Guess who's getting used to working with robots in their everyday lives? The very same warehouse workers once predicted to be losing their jobs to mechanical replacements.

But doing your job side-by-side with robots isn't easy. According to their makers, the machines should take on the most mundane and physically strenuous tasks. In reality, they're also creating new forms of stress and strain in the form of injuries and the unease of working in close quarters with mobile half-ton devices that direct themselves.

"They weigh a lot," Amazon worker Amanda Taillon said during the pre-Christmas rush at a company warehouse in Connecticut. Nearby, a fleet of 6-foot-tall roving robot shelves zipped around behind a chain-link fence.

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the world’s richest man, is always pulling new rabbits out of his hat, like next-day or same-day shipping and cashier-less stores. Besides, there is Blue Origin, the aerospace company privately owned by Bezos, which is on a mission to make spaceflight possible for everyone.

Last-minute purchases on Amazon Prime might be convenient, but workers at the Sacramento Amazon warehouse say the back-breaking work of lifting and sorting orders during the holiday rush is leading to a high number of injuries.

The Sacramento fulfillment center had one of the worst injury rates among Amazon’s warehouses in the United States last year, according to a recent investigation by Reveal, from the Center for Investigative Reporting.

In 2018, there were 385 injuries reported at the local fulfillment center, just across the street from Sacramento International Airport, according to records submitted by Amazon to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Of those injuries, more than half required the injured person to take time off work. Another 153 cases required the injured person to transfer jobs or work under new restrictions.

With Amazon.com Inc.’s next-day and 2-day delivery precedent set, more retailers have spent the last year upping their fulfillment game.

44% of the 1,188 U.S. online shoppers polled in the June 2019 fulfillment survey conducted by Digital Commerce 360/Bizrate Insights said they haven’t placed an order with a retailer because it wouldn’t arrive on time, and 20% said that they didn’t place an order because the delivery date was unclear.

To accommodate some of these consumer expectations, retailers are opening new fulfillment centers to streamline operations, while others are adding robotics to make fulfillment more efficient. Plus, vendors and fulfillment companies are experimenting with new technologies to better meet consumer demands.

Over the past decade, Amazon has found its way into your homes with Alexa, in your ears with Audible, on your screens with Amazon Prime Video, and maybe even in your fridge if you shop at Whole Foods. 

But the tech giant's reach does not end with products and streaming services. With Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company now holds a 50 per cent share of the cloud hosting market, according to a Gartner report published in July 2019.

"Any website that you don't know where it's hosted might be on Amazon's servers or Microsoft's or Google's. That's the primary way in which you may be interacting with Amazon and not know it," says Brad Stone, author of The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon.

The San Francisco-based tech reporter with Bloomberg started researching Amazon for his book a decade ago. Stone spoke to The Current's interim host Nil Köksal about the company's foray into cloud hosting and its future in the next 10 years.

“Robots are really data generating connected endpoints.They have an internet connection. They’re out there doing a task out in our field. In the case of Amazon robotics, they are moving product around so that it can be easily picked up and put into a box.” says Roger Barga, Amazon Web Services general manager of robotics and autonomous services.

Employees Are Excited About the Possibilities

During the course of our conversations, many people told us they could see or imagine the positive impact of automation on their jobs and the tasks they performed. They described how automation had the potential to remove some of the most boring and repetitive aspects of their roles.

“The automation of scheduling has made my job more efficient and a lot quicker,” is how one delivery driver described it. “It has smoothed out the little frustrations and helps me meet my performance targets.”

Automation has already meant fewer manual tasks and more intellectually challenging tasks for some. It also has meant more exciting work and the possibility of securing new and different jobs.

Prime is naturally costing Amazon a fortune. The company said in October that in the three months spanning June to September, it spent 50 percent more — an eye-popping $9.6 billion — on fulfillment alone, due both to one-day Prime shipping and the general expansion of its retail operation in the US. But for Amazon, it’s a worthwhile expenditure if it means it can control the entire delivery chain from start to finish. At the appropriate scale, that would start saving Amazon money and allow it to become even more efficient at delivering products.

Walmart is surging past Amazon as Americans’ favorite online grocery source, according to a new study.

About 37% of respondents in Lake Success, New York-based Retail Feedback  Group’s 2019 U.S. Online Grocery Shopper Study said Walmart was their most recent source of online groceries. Amazon was second with 29%.

More than half of shoppers tried or shopped with only one online grocery provider in the last twelve months. About 20% indicated they shop mostly or only online for food and groceries, while 32% indicated they shop online and in-store about equally.

About 48% mostly shop instore and occasionally shop online for food and groceries. Fulfillment by pickup appears to be “picking up” with 47% of those surveyed now indicating their orders were picked up (compared to 43% last year).

Perfectly suited for consumer electronics in-store micro-fulfillment is AutoStore®, a modular, highly-automated eCommerce fulfillment system that is compact enough to be placed almost anywhere in-store, equipped to fulfill online orders fast and efficiently.

Buildings under construction are a maze of half-completed structures, gantries, stacked materials, and busy workers — tracking what’s going on can be a nightmare. Scaled Robotics has designed a robot that can navigate this chaos and produce 3D progress maps in minutes, precise enough to detect that a beam is just a centimeter or two off.

Bottlenecks in construction aren’t limited to manpower and materials. Understanding exactly what’s been done and what needs doing is a critical part of completing a project in good time, but it’s the kind of painstaking work that requires special training and equipment. Or, as Scaled Robotics showed today at TC Disrupt Berlin 2019, specially trained equipment.