Walmart Reportedly Developing Robotic Shopping Carts

Posted on June 18, 2016

Walmart is currently working on a plan to offer robotic shopping carts. A Bloomberg story says the retail giant is working with Five Elements Robotics on a robotic cart that could move itself and help customers find items on their shopping lists.

Five Elements makes a robot named Budgee. Budgee can follow you and carry your things. It is designed to carry up to 50lbs. It can also be controlled with a smartphone. Bloomberg says Walmart is working on with Five Elements on a robotic cart prototype. The robot could resemble the company's Budgee robot. It will at least have similar functionality.

Here is a video of Budgee in action:

The Bloomberg story says Walmart is currently evaluating the shopping cart robot prototype in its lab. These types of robots are a reality these days as the Budgee robot above indicates but they are not cheap. Budgee retails for $1,400 each. Even with a discount for a large order shopping cart robots would be a big investment for Walmart to have them in every store. It is likely Walmart would test the robots in a few stores first.

More from Science Space & Robots