By Steven Keith Platt, Director and Research Fellow, Platt Retail Institute, and Research Director, Retail Analytics Council, Northwestern University
How semi- to fully autonomous robots will continue to change retail.
Robots have been around for many years.1 In fact, General Motors introduced industrial robots into production lines as far back as 1961.2 These early robots were focused on simple repetitive manufacturing tasks. More recently, advancements in technology have led to autonomous mobile manipulation platforms, including those with the ability to pick and sort, such as the more than 100,000 robots deployed by Amazon in its warehouses.3