New handyman clerk at Lowe's is a robot

Someday, the helpful hardware man may not be a man at all

Lowe's, one of the biggest retail hardware and DIY stores in the U.S., unveiled on Tuesday its first in-store robot clerk: OSHbot.

See also: Jibo Wants to Be the World’s First Family Robot

The company is setting the roughly 5-feet-tall autonomous robot loose on unsuspecting consumers sometime soon in its San Jose, California-based Orchard Supply Store, a chain that's owned by Lowe's.

Developed by Fellow Robots, in partnership with Lowe's own Innovation Labs, OSHbot is to have a map of the store and obstacle avoidance abilities to make its way through the aisles. It will feature a large, 19.5-inch touchscreen on the front and be able to use speech recognition to communicate in English and, soon, a number of other languages, including Spanish. There's another even larger screen on the back of OSHbot, which appears to be primarily a place to run advertisements and in-store promotions. Read more...

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