Telexistence Inc and FamilyMart Co are rolling out a fleet of artificial intelligence (AI)-driven robots to restock shelves in 300 convenience stores across Japan.
The robot arms are designed to replenish drinks in refrigerators and are in mass production, Tokyo-based Telexistence said in a statement yesterday.
They are to be installed in FamilyMart locations across major metropolitan areas later this month and help relieve store workers while also filling the void left by a shrinking workforce in the country.
Dubbed TX SCARA — which stands for Selective Compliance Assembly Robot Arm — the machines are largely autonomous, with remote piloting as a fallback option should the AI fail or encounter out-of-place items. Each unit can replace one to three hours of human work per day per store, Telexistence said.
“The decline in Japan’s labor population is one of the key management issues for FamilyMart to continue stable store operations,” FamilyMart general manager Tomohiro Kano said. “The newly created time can be reallocated to customer service and shop floor enhancement.”
FamilyMart is to pay Telexistence a monthly fee for the robot’s labor, its maintenance and the support of remote workers who can pilot the arm using a virtual reality headset when needed.
The bots can work without human assistance 98 percent of the time, Telexistence said.
US tech giants Microsoft Corp and Nvidia Corp collaborated with Telexistence on the development and technology of the bots. The SCARA arms use Nvidia’s Jetson AI platform to process information and Microsoft’s Azure cloud infrastructure to record and reference sales data to optimize restocking tasks.
FamilyMart has 16,000 convenience stores across its domestic market, but Telexistence and Microsoft say they want to deliver the technology on a global scale.
Telexistence next plans to target the more than 150,000 convenience stores across the US.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by