
LoweBot - adenadel
http://www.lowesinnovationlabs.com/lowebot
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asimuvPR
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".

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hga
_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.

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Jack000
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.

~~~
hga
And/or it can deal with that it comes across. A thin package of screws and
nuts, e.g. Home Depot sells a line where a huge selection is like $1.83 or
$1.18 (e.g. each package will have a certain balanced set of nuts and bolts,
or a few screws), and those packages are sufficiently flat I'd expect them to
be no obstacle. Bigger stuff it could just push forward, ideally sensing when
that was happening and backing up and going another way. The big trick would
be the stuff just low enough to get under it, but that would then block it and
get stuck.

This is just off the top of my head, and I'm intrinsically not interesting in
robots, I'll bet this is a well developed area in it by now.

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ape4
People are great at vague queries... where can I get the thing that goes up
and down in the back of a toilet?

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

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

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proksoup
Owl statues. Decorative, or to scare away other birds and rodents.

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spiralganglion
I collect owl-themed objects, so to me it's a perfectly sensible query. I've
surely uttered those words myself once or twice.

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koolba
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
> 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
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.

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

~~~
billhathaway
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
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."

~~~
greggman
If the robot is using the same DB it will have the same problem. If it's using
a different DB the app should be switched to that DB.

Or maybe the robot should walk the aisles and scan all bar codes to make the
DB for both

Personally I don't want to install an app, I just want to visit a mobile
webpage.

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

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

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radiorental
initially with SLAM
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_and_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_and_mapping)

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ourmandave
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_
Lobot would have been the better Star Wars reference.

[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Lobot](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Lobot)

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codecamper
ex ter min ate! ex ter min ate!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxD-5z_xHBU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxD-5z_xHBU)

