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.

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For some residents of San Francisco, the robotic future of driving is just a tap away. Ride-hailing services from GM subsidiary Cruise and Alphabet company Waymo allow them to summon a driverless ride with an app. But some riders have become perhaps too comfortable with the technology.

In a letter filed with a California regulator yesterday, city agencies complained that on three separate occasions since December, cruise staff called 911 after a passenger in one of its driverless vehicles became “unresponsive” to the two-way voice link installed in each car. Each time, police and firefighters rushed to the scene but found the same thing: a passenger who had fallen asleep in their robot ride.

The agencies’ letter complains that the incidents wasted public money and potentially diverted resources from people truly in need. “Taxpayer funded emergency response resources used for nonemergencies undermine their availability to members of the public in true nee[d],” wrote the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, the San Francisco County Transportation Authority, and the Mayor’s Office on Disability.

The letter was one of a series sent to the California Public Utilities Commission this week by transportation officials in San Francisco and Los Angeles seeking to pump the brakes on Cruise and Waymo’s requests to expand their paid robotaxi services in both cities. The cities say they’re worried the technology isn’t ready. And they want the companies to be required to share more data about the performance of their cars, and meet specific benchmarks, before service can be expanded.

The San Francisco agencies cite a number of unsettling and previously unreported incidents, including the false alarms over snoozing riders and two incidents in which self-driving vehicles from Cruise appear to have impeded firefighters from doing their jobs.

One incident occurred in June of last year, a few days after the state gave Cruise permission to pick up paying passengers in the city. One of the company’s robotaxis ran over a fire hose in use at an active fire scene, the agencies’ letter says, an action that “can seriously injure firefighters.”

In the second incident, just last week, the city says firefighters attending a major fire in the Western Addition neighborhood saw a driverless cruise vehicle approaching. They “made efforts to prevent the Cruise AV from driving over their hoses and were not able to do so until they shattered a front window of the Cruise AV,” the San Francisco agencies wrote in their letter.

San Francisco Fire Department spokesperson Jonathan Baxter confirmed that the two incidents occurred. He says that in the most recent it took approximately two minutes for the autonomous vehicle to stop, and that the department is in touch with Cruise about both encounters with firefighters. Cruise spokesperson Hannah Lindow says the vehicle was stationary by the time a firefighter broke its glass. WIRED previously reported that a Cruise vehicle blocked one of the department’s fire engines on the way to a major blaze for roughly 25 seconds last spring.

Lindow says that some data Cruise provides to regulators must be kept private for customer safety, and to protect “proprietary information.” She wrote in a statement that the company has “driven millions of miles in an extremely complex urban environment with zero life-threatening injuries or fatalities.”

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Around midnight on June 28, Calvin Hu was driving with his girlfriend near San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park when he pulled up at an intersection behind two white and orange autonomous Chevrolet Bolts operated by Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors. Another was stopped to his right in the adjacent lane. The light turned green but the cars, which operate in the city without drivers, didn’t move.

When Hu prepared to reverse and go around the frozen vehicles, he says, he noticed that several more cruise vehicles had stopped in the lanes behind him. Hu, another driver, and a paratransit bus were trapped in a robotaxi sandwich.

After a few minutes of bemused waiting, Hu says, he resorted to driving over the curbs of the street’s median to escape. When he returned on foot a few minutes later to see whether the situation had resolved, the Cruise vehicles hadn’t budgeted. A person who appeared to work for the company had parked in the intersection, Hu says, as if to indicate the street was closed, and was trying to direct traffic away from the immobile self-driving cars. Hu estimates that the robot car blockade, which has not previously been reported, lasted at least 15 minutes.

The cruise vehicles that trapped Hu weren’t the only autonomous cars holding up traffic in San Francisco that night. Internal messages seen by WIRED show that nearly 60 vehicles were disabled across the city over a 90-minute period after they lost touch with a Cruise server. As many as 20 cars, some of them halted in crosswalks, created a jam in the city’s downtown in an incident first reported by the San Francisco Examiner and detailed in photos posted to Reddit. In a written statement the California Department of Motor Vehicles, which oversees the state’s autonomous vehicle operations, said it was aware of the incident and would meet with Cruise to “gather additional information.”

The June 28 outage wasn’t Cruise’s first. On the evening of May 18, the company lost touch with its entire fleet for 20 minutes as its cars sat stopped in the street, according to internal documentation viewed by WIRED. Company staff were unable to see where the vehicles were located or communicate with riders inside. Worst of all, the company was unable to access its system which allows remote operators to safely steer stopped vehicles to the side of the road.

A letter sent anonymously by a Cruise employee to the California Public Utilities Commission that month, which was reviewed by WIRED, alleged that the company loses contact with its driverless vehicles “with regularity,” blocking traffic and potentially hindering emergency vehicles. The vehicles can sometimes only be recovered by tow truck, the letter said. Images and video posted on social media in May and June show Cruise vehicles stopped in San Francisco traffic lanes seemingly inexplicably, as the city’s pedestrians and motorists navigate around them.

Cruise spokesperson Tiffany Testo says that the cars stuck on May 18 “were able to move over as part of the suite of fallback systems Cruise has in place.” She provided a written statement that said the company’s vehicles are programmed to pull over and turn on their hazard lights when they encounter a technical problem or meet road conditions they can’t handle. “We’re working to minimize how often this happens, but it is and will remain one aspect of our overall safety operations,” the statement said. Testo did not respond to questions about multiple incidents in which Cruise vehicles stopped in traffic.

The outages come at a vital time for Cruise, which is accelerating its autonomous vehicle program on the tricky streets of San Francisco as it competes with well-capitalized rivals like Google’s sister company Waymo, Aurora, and Zoox, which is owned by Amazon. In the spring, General Motors bought out the SoftBank Vision Fund’s $2.1 billion stake in Cruise and invested another $1.35 billion into the self-driving unit. Just over two weeks after the May outage that froze Cruise’s fleet, the CPUC approved Cruise’s permit to charge money for Uber-like ride-hail rides—opening a path to a full commercial robotaxi service that could help the company start to recover the billions it has poured into building its technology.

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As I slide my finger into the handle, a rubber ring clamps around my ankle to hold it in place. It’s a gentle reminder to move as little as possible, although I’ve also been warned not to be too rigid.

“Done,” I announce. The flash machine takes a photo of my finger and records exactly where my frayed cuticle borders my nail and the length of the nail itself. The familiar whir of an inkjet printer begins and lowers a small, rectangular capsule with a pointed tip, almost like the tip of a colored pencil down to my index fingernail, but not without stopping, to a quick dab of the maroon paint on a pad toward the back of the machine. Just like your local manicure ensures that the Goldilocks amount of nail polish is on the bottle’s brush when it starts to paint – not too much, not too little – so does the robotic arm.

I get a manicure from a robot in the marina and yeah, it’s maybe one of the most stereotypical, tech-savvy things I have ever done in San Francisco. But as I watch the tiny brush head draw a near-perfect outline of my nail before I fill it with paint in a mesmerizing loop, I reluctantly admit to myself that this is almost certainly the future.

Or at least part of the future, much like how Ubers is more ubiquitous today than taxis and Soylent is part of the food system. They are options that will remain, whether we like it or not.

For starters, having a robot painting your nails is quick and cheap. Shellac a deep red chestnut cost me $ 8 and was done in 10 minutes. Plus, you don’t need cash to tip a robot.

Exactly for this reason, founder Renuka Apte came up with her company Clockwork. “I used to feel really guilty about the time I spent on beauty routines, and that wasn’t something my mostly male coworkers had to do,” she said. “They said, ‘Oh, don’t do it,’ but they didn’t understand. It was an ongoing thing in the back of my mind. “

She and a colleague, James Rasmussen, had talked for a while about starting a business together, and after doing a few focus groups with women, Apte convinced him that this was their big opportunity.

Two and a half years later, Apte estimates that Clockwork may be the fastest robotics company making sales.

It took about eight months to get an initial prototype and the machine has been improved ever since. The biggest learning curve was finding out that they couldn’t use traditional nail polish bottles; they had to invent their own cartridge. Today they buy paints from well-known brands like OPI and CND and use them to make proprietary cartridges.

Then there was the handle, something that seemed easy, said Apte, but in the end it was anything but. She had to find the best way to keep people relaxed, comfortable, and calm while also being suitable for different hand sizes.

When some nail polish dripped on the skin of my little finger, Apte said the machine is still learning – the more nails it sees, the better the AI ​​gets. It’s also just a coat of polish (although it feels thicker than a coat you would do at home) but I was told to add a top coat at home if I wanted the manicure to last longer.

Clockwork founder Renuka Apte supports a customer.

clockwork

Without the recommended topcoat, my index fingernail lost a corner of the nail polish and was chipped the next morning, and by the fourth day I considered removing it entirely. Still, as someone who doesn’t get their nails done regularly in a salon (this was my first manicure since January 2020), my first question to Apte was when she plans to debut her robots in airports, where might someone? Opt for a quick, temporary fix without having to put in a manicure before traveling. I know that if my flight is delayed and I already have my pre-flight beer limit, that’s exactly what I want to do before vacation.

Apte said the company doesn’t have any airport infiltration plans yet, but she sees the machines as I do. Maybe they won’t replace the gel manicure you need for your sister’s wedding, but it could certainly replace the weekly manicure you get just to look professional for an evening. She envisions the machines in the lobbies of luxury apartments or commercial buildings or even in retail stores, ideally no more than a 10-minute walk from you.

The Clockwork location in the marina I visited is designed more as a showroom and demo room and currently only accepts appointments from Friday to Sunday. While the demand is certainly to have more days open each week, Apte said they need to focus on other aspects of the business. She hopes you won’t need a clockwork appointment in the future. You just go to your app and go to the next machine. “We want to make this as easy as a cup of coffee and as affordable,” she said. “… We want to be the fast-casual restaurant of beauty.”

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