Retail
Service robots for retail
A retail service robot carries stock between a stock room and the shop floor, guides a customer to a named location in the store, and plays brand video on its screen between tasks. Hybot treats each of those as a task against a configured point of interest, assigned automatically by priority, distance and remaining battery.
Three jobs, one robot
Retail is the setting where the robot's screen is worth as much as its load bay. A store deployment typically uses the same robot for three distinct jobs:
- Carrying. Stock from a back room to a named point on the floor, and empty packaging back. This is a delivery task like any other, scored against the queue every two seconds by priority, distance and battery.
- Guiding. A robot can be dispatched directly to a configured point of interest, which is what "show me where the batteries are" becomes once the aisle is a mapped point.
- Showing. Between tasks the screen runs an advertisement playlist rather than an idle logo.
The screen is real inventory
Every project has its own advertisement library with a platform-controlled storage quota, ordered or random playlists, text overlays, per-image timing and a preview. It draws on the same media library as the menu, so a photograph uploaded once is available to both.
On top of that, the Central Platform can assign brand adverts from a shared video library to selected projects. The scheduling rule is the important part: a platform-assigned brand advert only begins at a completed advertisement cycle boundary, and never interrupts a guest who is ordering or answering a survey. An advertising network that interrupts the transaction it is attached to destroys the venue relationship it depends on, so that constraint lives in the scheduler rather than in a contract.
What this page will not do is quote reach. Screen counts, impressions and rates have not been established, so there are no audience figures here to cite. The advertising on robot screens page is equally direct about it.
What retail asks that hospitality does not
Store layouts change constantly. That makes the point-of-interest workflow more important than the initial mapping: points are re-imported from the robot and re-placed against a stored per-floor alignment, pushes to the robot are previewed before they apply, a bulk move is blocked pending review, and forty snapshots per floor are retained and restorable. A seasonal reset therefore means editing a point list, not remapping a store.
Deployments
There is no published retail deployment. Nothing here is drawn from a store we have not deployed, and no conversion or dwell-time figure is offered because none has been measured.
Related reading
- Advertising on robot screens — how the playlists and cycle boundaries work
- What is a service robot?
- Service robots for warehouses — the same carrying problem without a customer in front of it
Frequently asked questions
Can a robot guide a customer to a product?
- It can travel to any configured point of interest, so it can lead someone to an aisle, a counter or a fitting room that has been mapped as a point. It does not know where an individual product sits on a shelf unless that location is itself a point.
What does the robot show on its screen when it is not working?
- An advertisement playlist. Each project has its own advertisement library with ordered or random playlists, text overlays and per-image timing, and a platform-assigned brand campaign can run alongside it at cycle boundaries.
Will an advert interrupt a customer mid-interaction?
- No. Platform-assigned brand adverts only start at a completed advertisement cycle boundary, and they never interrupt ordering or a survey in progress. That constraint is in the scheduler rather than left to whoever books the campaign.
Does the robot need the shop floor to be rearranged?
- It needs a navigable path wide enough for the robot at the tightest point, and somewhere to charge. Fixtures can move afterwards; what changes is the point of interest list, which is re-imported and re-placed against the stored floor alignment.
Is there a retail deployment published?
- No. This page describes platform capability rather than a store that is running it. A retail reference will appear here when a deployment is live and the retailer has approved being written about.
Where this fits
This page is part of Smart robotic solutions by industry. If you are working through the topic in order, these are the neighbouring pages.
Service robots for restaurants
Restaurant service robots run food, drinks, bills and dish collection between the kitchen and the table, and take orders at the table through a kiosk screen.
Service robots for warehouses
Warehouse service robots move loads between named points on a mapped floor, taking the repeated walking out of picking, replenishment and returns handling.
Service robots for offices and workplaces
Office service robots handle internal deliveries, refreshment runs and visitor guidance between named points, and show information on screen between tasks.
Tell us about the venue
Pricing depends on unit count, layout and integration work, so we quote against a real site rather than publishing a package.