How are Grocery Bagging Robots Alerting the Panorama of Supermarkets?

These days, grocery stores are switching to robots for efficiently tracking inventories and serve customers, as there is a growing need for hygiene and workforce efficacy. The invention of robots that help in bagging groceries has revolutionized the grocery and supermarket businesses.

Here are some of the best robotic models that can help in simplifying tasks at a grocery store.

1. Origami Robot

This advanced robot was developed by researchers at MIT and Harvard to bag groceries.  This model is an oragami-inspired Magic Ball robot gripper that can smoothly pick up objects with irregular shapes and keep them back, wherever they are required to go.

This robot comes with a novel gripper which is both soft as well as strong: a cone-shaped origami setup that collapses in on items, similar to a Venus flytrap, to grip and pick objects that are nearly 100 times its weight. This robot is able to pick up a broad range of items including hammers, drones, soup cans, wine glasses, and even a single cauliflower floret.

2. Online Grocer Ocado

The novel robot from the online grocer Ocado makes use of a soft robotic hand that is proficient to pick up an extensive array of fruits as well as vegetables smoothly. Ocado partnered with the European Union's Soft Manipulation (SoMa) project, which is scrutinizing industrial uses of soft robotics, to develop the robotic arm that is well capable of picking up everything from oranges to a shopping bag full of lemons without causing them any damage. Ocado’s team is developing the robot even further so that it can be used in its profoundly automated grocery warehouses. However, the robot needs to undergo a little more progress before the model is ready for setting out in the warehouses or at local stores.

3. Panasonic’s Reji Robo

Panasonic, a well-known company that aims to enrich people’s lifestyle with innovative products, has developed a supermarket robot -Reji Robo- proficient of bagging bought grocery items. The aim of this invention is to substitute human labours. The self-bagging supermarket robo has been experimented at the Lawson superstore in Osaka. Customers place the objects in sensor-equipped containers. Reji Robo will scan the items while they are still in your shopping basket, and it will bag them for you as well. The whole amount billed is then showed on a screen, which needs to be paid at the billing counter.

4. SmartSight Retail Intelligence Automation System

Zebra Technologies Corp., a global frontrunner in ground-breaking digital solutions, hardware, and software, has developed a SmartSight system with an aim to enhance front-of-store tasks and improve customer experiences at mass wholesalers, grocery stores, and supermarkets. As per Zebra, the key cause of retailers losing in-store buying to online shopping is owing to the glitches in inventory management, particularly out-of-stock products. SmartSight is equipped with features like machine learning, computer vision, workflow automation, and the competences of Zebra’s EMA50 mobile robots to precisely detect out-of-stock products, pricing discrepancies, as well as planogram issues on the shelf. This robot can aid store owners and managers considerably lessen out-of-stock circumstances and curtail the incidence of price mislabelling problems, which can result in increased customer loyalty and average basket size.

The Changing Face of the Grocery Retail Sector

Local grocery stores as well as big supermarket chains are increasingly arranging robots to sanitize floorings, manage stock on shelves, and deliver products to customers during the coronavirus pandemic. The store owners are hunting for ideas to lessen pressure on human workforces and build efficacy amidst an increase of customers visiting stores and ordering online during the pandemic. There is a strong belief among grocery store owners that robots and artificial intelligence hold the potential to offer solutions that can aid them reduce down costs and significantly enhance store operations. Today, there is a great need for rapidly adopting technological changes as business persons are well aware that they need to up their game to hold a leading position and automate rather than maintain human workforces, mainly in today’s labour shortage situations.

About the Author(s)

   

Aishwarya Korgaonkar

Aishwarya Korgaonkar holds a bachelor’s degree in Information Technology from the esteemed Mumbai University. Being creative and artistic, she leaped into the field of digital marketing and content writing. Her love for words makes her write creative, and her spellbinding content adds colors to the world.