The context: “Looking and pointing” robots in retail

Deploying 500 robots in the wild is one of Auki’s main goals for 2026. And we want to send them out to do real, value-generating work.

Our robots won’t be folding laundry or loading dishwashers like you’ve seen many demos of humanoid robots doing. Those types of manipulation tasks are difficult both technically and financially, since the unit economics of shipping individual robots to people’s homes to do chores don’t really make sense unless it’s an exercise in subsidizing data collection.

Instead, we’ve realized that there are many “looking and pointing” tasks that are much more valuable than manipulation tasks. For example, in retail stores, robots without any sophisticated manipulation capabilities can do a few jobs already just by connecting to the real world web and Cactus, our spatial AI platform:

1. Shelf audits: Each night, robots can drive around the store capturing camera data of shelves, and Cactus will generate an AI task list. One of Europe’s largest non-grocery retailers told us their staff lose 30–60min every day just figuring out where to begin, so having a pre-generated task list will recover a lot of wasted time.
   
   While competing camera tower robots that do shelf scanning already exist, they have a surprisingly high failure rate due to glare on the price tags. Our robots will solve this problem by simply bringing a barcode scanner closer to each tag, i.e. “pointing” at it.
   ‍

2. Customer guidance: US research suggests that up to 6% of shopper baskets would contain one more item if the staff were more knowledgeable about products and where they are. That’s easy for our robots since they’re already connected to the map of where every single product is, so all they need to do is lead the customer there and point at it.
   
   This is the one we need your help with, but more on that later.
   ‍

3. Remote brand audits: This one is the least obvious but solves a problem for much bigger players than the stores themselves: brands pay for special treatment in stores, and then have to send field reps to those stores to check shelf space, placement, stock, and pricing in person. One of the world’s largest brands has 400 field reps in Sweden alone.
   ‍

By giving them remote access to the robot, field reps can skip the many hours of driving to stores and simply connect to the robot, ask it to drive over to the shelf, and inspect it remotely.

We call this telespectating, and it’s so appealing that two of the world’s biggest brands have already told us they’d consider paying for the entire robot to be in the store just so they can use it for this.

A robot that does just these three jobs is already a no-brainer at our planned price of $100/day. In the following years as manipulation capabilities catch up, the same robot will be able to do even more, like order picking and restocking.

The ask: Customer guidance training data

In the meantime, we’re looking for some help collecting training data for the customer guidance task in the form of questions/requests.

What would you ask a robot in a grocery store? Please send us audio recordings of up to 5 questions/requests per person, English only. As long as they’re intelligible and sensible, we’ll reward you 500 $AUKI per question.

Here’s the form: https://forms.gle/nW8UAWWmNTpTVxLP9

We’ll close it after the first ~100 responses.

Thank you and we look forward to deploying robots in grocery stores next year with the community’s help!

アウキ・ラボについて

Aukiはポーズメッシュという地球上、そしてその先の1000億の人々、デバイス、AIのための分散型機械認識ネットワークを構築しています。ポーズメッシュは、機械やAIが物理的世界を理解するために使用可能な、外部的かつ協調的な空間感覚です。

私たちの使命は、人々の相互認知能力、つまり私たちが互いに、そしてAIとともに考え、経験し、問題を解決する能力を向上させることです。人間の能力を拡大させる最も良い方法は、他者と協力することです。私たちは、意識を拡張するテクノロジーを構築し、コミュニケーションの摩擦を減らし、心の橋渡しをします。

ポーズメッシュについて

ポーズメッシュは、分散型で、ブロックチェーンベースの空間コンピューティングネットワークを動かすオープンソースのプロトコルです。

ポーズメッシュは、空間コンピューティングが協調的でプライバシーを保護する未来をもたらすよう設計されています。いかなる組織の監視能力も制限し、空間のプライベートな地図の自己所有権を奨励します。

分散化はまた、特に低レイテンシが重要な共同ARセッションにおいて、競争優位性を有します。ポスメッシュは分散化運動の次のステップであり、成長するテック大手のパワーに対抗するものです。

アウキ・ラボはポスメッシュにより、ポーズメッシュのソフトウェア・インフラの開発を託されました。