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.
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