Lowe’s robotic desires that will help you discover the plumbing aisle

There might come a day when you stop by Lowe's looking for a wrench and ask a robot where to find it.

The home improvement retailer is rolling out the LoweBot to 11 stores in the San Francisco Bay Area, starting with San Jose in September. The LoweBot is an autonomous NAVii retail services robot capable of moving around the store, scanning inventory and guiding customers to the screw, hammer or toilet seat they are looking for. Customers can either ask the robot or enter their request on a touchscreen.

That doesn't mean Lowe's will become a robot-run, human-less retailer.

“By leaving the data and simple recommendations to NAVii, Lowe’s employees can focus on Lowe’s customers,” Marco Mascorro, CEO of Fellow Robots, said in a statement. Fellow Robots specializes in the design and development of autonomous service robots and worked with Lowe's on the project.

The robot initially made it to one of the company's Orchard Supply Hardware stores for a pilot run. “Lowe's wanted to see if the technology worked and if people actually liked it,” Kyle Nel, managing director of Lowe's Innovation Labs, told CNET.

This new phase is about seeing how the robots perform in larger stores and of course in more than one store.

“We hope to better understand what scale might look like across multiple stores so we can determine what happens next,” Nel said.

Lowe's isn't the first retailer to take an interest in how robots can help employees and customers. In April, Target conducted a week-long test trial of a robot that could track inventory at one of its stores in downtown San Francisco. Last year, Best Buy in New York tested a customer service robot named Chloe. Robots have been used behind the scenes for years, for example in Amazon's logistics centers.

And beyond robots, Lowe's has also tried other types of technology, such as using virtual reality and Microsoft's HoloLens augmented reality headset to help customers redesign spaces.

So the LoweBot could just be a hint of what's to come in customer service.

Just don't ask what color would look best in your kitchen.