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Googly-eyed robot risk manager to look for spills in grocery store

Posted On: Jan. 15, 2019 12:36 PM CST

Googly-eyed robot risk manager to look for spills in grocery store

First, they came to replace the supermarket checkout person. Now they’ve come for the risk managers. Technology and automation, that is.

Carlisle, Pennsylvania-based Giant LLC will be deploying an army of robot assistants at its grocery stores through Pennsylvania to help watch for spills, hazards, inventory and other monitoring activities that will help with the large supermarket chain’s bottle line.

“Marty,” the tall gray robot on wheels, has been operating at Giant stores in two cities since 2017, and by the middle of this year the chain expects to have one of the devices patrolling the aisles at each of its 172 stores, according to an article on LancasterOnline.com.

The primary function of the in-store robot, which the newspaper said resembles the offspring of Cookie Monster and a tackling dummy, is to move around scanning for spills and other customer hazards to which it can alert store employees, according to the article.

Marty will post itself next to hazards while flashing its lights, deploying a cleanup request to go over the store’s intercom system. Once an employee wipes the spill, they can press a button on Marty to have it go back into its normal mode, the newspaper reported.