BENTONVILLE, Ark. and SAN DIEGO, Ca.--Sam's Club has completed a roll out of inventory scanning towers that have been added to its existing fleet of floor scrubbing robots. The club store had started adding the inventory towers to its robots in January, and now all locations have the technology added. "Our initial goal at Sam's Club was to convert time historically spent on scrubbers to more member-focused activities. Our autonomous scrubbers have exceeded this goal. In addition to increasing the consistency and frequency of floor cleaning, intelligent scrubbers have empowered associates with critical insights," said Todd Garner, vice president, in-club product management.

Walmart Inc.'s warehouse division Sam's Club is adding 372 floor-scrubbing robots to its fleet, putting the devices in all 599 U.S. clubs. Sam's Club is also expanding a pilot program to test shelf inventory technology that can be added to the robots. A Sam's Club spokeswoman said Thursday that the floor cleaners will give employees more time to focus on serving club members. Walmart stores use the same autonomous floor scrubbers that are powered by an operating system developed by Brain Corp. and made by Tennant Co. Walmart said in late 2018 it was adding 360 of the robots to an initial 100 used in a pilot program. In April 2019, the Bentonville-based retailer said it would have the floor cleaners in 1,860 stores by the following February.

New York (CNN Business)Soon every Sam's Club will have a robot to scrub the store floors. In partnership with Brain Corp, an artificial intelligence company, the membership-only warehouse chain will distribute 372 new autonomous floor scrubbers to its stores this fall. Sam's Club, which is owned by Walmart, has already deployed hundreds of the robotic scrubbers. With the addition of 372 new robots, the company will soon have a scrubber in each location. It will also implement one of Brain Corp's accessories that will allow them to analyze shelf inventory.

Schnuck Markets plans another robot rollout, this time to aid in store maintenance. San Diego-based Brain Corp., said Wednesday that its artificial intelligence (AI) technology will power Tennant Corp. floor-scrubbing robots to be deployed at more than half of Schnucks stores by the end of the year. The St. Louis-based grocer operates 112 supermarkets in Missouri, Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin. Related: Schnuck Markets rolls out shelf-scanning robots to over half of store baseThe autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), Tennant model T380AMR robotic scrubbers, incorporate new software features for BrainOS-enabled robotic scrubbers that deliver improved cleaning efficiency and flexibility for commercial locations, according to Brain Corp. The BrainOS AI platform is used to build, operate, and manage multiple robotic applications.

Joe Wieciek, Software Ops Manager at Brain Corp, shares the five most important lessons learned from powering the world's largest fleet of autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) operating in commercial indoor public spaces AI software technology today is used to build autonomous robots for the retail industry, malls, airports, hospitals and more. At Brain Corp, our groundbreaking work with our manufacturing partners has helped us build and sell several autonomous mobile robots (AMR) across several verticals and brands. Once the robots are deployed, our software operations team works diligently to ensure that every BrainOS -enabled robot performs well in the field, collecting data and insights via the cloud that we use to improve our software and systems, and ultimately create better user experiences. However, managing a handful of robots in the field is drastically different from managing a large global fleet. We learned that the hard way on our path to powering the largest fleet in the world of autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) operating in commercial indoor public spaces.

Phil Duffy, is the VP of Product, Program & UX Design at Brain Corp a San Diego-based technology company specializing in the development of intelligent, autonomous navigation systems for everyday machines.The company was co-founded in 2009 by world-renowned computational neuroscientist, Dr. Eugene Izhikevich, and serial tech entrepreneur, Dr. Allen Gruber. The company is now focused on developing advanced machine learning and computer vision systems for the next generation of self-driving robots.Brain Corp powers the largest fleet of autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) with over 10,000 robots deployed or enabled worldwide and works with several Fortune 500 customers like Walmart and Kroger.What attracted you initially to the field of robotics?My personal interest in developing robots over the last two decades stems from the fact that intelligent robots are one of the two major unfulfilled dreams of the last century--the other dream being flying cars.Scientists, science-fiction writers, and filmmakers all predicted we would have intelligent robots doing our bidding and helping us in our daily lives a long time ago.

Every recession in the past and downturn in modern memory has led to the revolution of tech industry incumbents and the rise of new powers. The brutal recession of the early 1980s gave rise to the personal computer era. In the milder recession of the early 1990s, the federal government essentially handed the internet over to the private sector and laid the seeds for the dotcom boom that gave birth to Amazon, while Microsoft pulled off Windows' victory over Apple. The Great Recession of 2008-2009 hit the technology industry much less harshly than the rest of the economy. While the industry didn't experience any major setback, the downturn did propel the rise of social media in the form of Facebook and Twitter.

The coronavirus outbreak has forced retailers to focus more on sanitation while they are struggling to restock shelves and hire more employees. Some grocery stores are turning to floor cleaning robots for additional help. Phil Duffy, vice president of product management and marketing at Brain Corp, shared how autonomous floor care robots are helping retailers. Brain Corp's proprietary software, BrainOS, is a cloud-connected operating system for commercial autonomous robots. Brain Corp has partnerships with major original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), such as Tennant, Minuteman, ICE, Kärcher, Nilfisk and SoftBank Robotics, to add autonomy to their existing floor care machines.

The simplest way to think about Artificial Intelligence is in the context of a human. It forms systems that work intelligently and independently. It can perform in complex environments, autonomously, and adapts to that environment by learning. From SIRI to self-driving cars, AI has taken the world by storm and has the potential to disrupt nearly every sector one can think of. AI has disrupted nearly every industry to boost efficiency in this competitive market. As part of our education program efforts, we prepared a list of 10 emerging companies in AI that in our judgement harnessing the true power of AI to make our lives easier and more efficient.

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--Fast-growing chipmaker Nvidia demonstrated its new Xavier Module to media members and others here at company headquarters on Dec. 12. The event also featured dozens of developers already building systems using Nvidia's Jetson AGX Xavier developer kit. The Xavier Module is small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, yet it delivers what Nvidia calls "workstation performance" with very low-energy consumption (as little as 10 watts) in the range of what a clock radio requires. Developers can use the module to power a new generation of intelligent robots and other autonomous devices. "It's built to be an AI [artificial intelligence] server in a small form factor," Deepu Talla, vice president and general manager of Autonomous Machines at Nvidia, said at the demonstration.