Marty: a googly-eyed robot that patrols grocery aisles for spills

A floor-inspection robot with googly eyes

Marty is a store-inspection robot made by Badger Technologies, a Jabil division. Badger developed it in partnership with Giant. Marty looks for spills of liquid, powder and bulk food and reports them to staff. It maps and navigates stores using lidar and 3-D depth cameras and has eight cameras in total. Adweek put its height at six feet three inches and Supermarket News at seven feet. The googly eyes are fake, and the cameras do the detecting.

From a 500-unit plan to a 300-store upgrade

In January 2019 VentureBeat reported that Badger would deploy robots to nearly 500 Giant, Martin’s and Stop & Shop stores. Supermarket News described the same plan as nearly 500 robots (sources differ). Giant planned to have robots in all 172 of its stores by mid-2019. That month Fox News reported 25 robots operating with 30 more arriving each week. When Marty detects a spill it stops, and staff at a control center in the Philippines review the images before a cleanup message plays over the loudspeaker. In September 2023 Badger and Stop & Shop announced that Marty had been upgraded at more than 300 locations. The new Marty checks shelf stock and finds misplaced items while still watching for floor hazards. Earlier, in February 2023, a Marty at a Giant store in Hellertown, Pennsylvania wandered into the parking lot and videos were posted online.

A smile in its eyes and a birthday party

According to Grocery Dive in January 2024, Stop & Shop said Marty spots nearly 40 spills or hazards per store each day. That figure is the company’s own. The company added a smile to Marty’s eyes and threw a one-year birthday party. Children have dressed up as Marty for Halloween. Some shoppers and workers have been suspicious of Marty following them, and some wondered whether it records video. Stop & Shop’s chief marketing officer Karen Mitchell said it does not and acknowledged mixed feelings: “People still roll their eyes or whatever from time to time.” In 2019 a union representing Giant and Stop & Shop workers was reported to be keeping an eye on Marty.

A store that explained its robot with a face

Stop & Shop added a smile to Marty’s eyes and held a birthday party to tell people what the robot does. Badger’s CEO said Stop & Shop has done a great job of communicating the robot’s purpose. The robot in our Bossa Nova record started with shelf scanning. Marty started with floor hazards, and shelf checks were mentioned as a possibility from 2019 and added in 2023. The sources we opened give no basis for saying floor detection outlasted shelf scanning. We also found no independent measurement of how much safer the stores became.

To tell people what a robot does, does it need a face or an explanation?

What we haven’t confirmed

• Which stores and how many units use Marty after 2024 (the last confirmation is more than 300 Stop & Shop stores in September 2023)
• Whether the roughly 500 is robots or stores (VentureBeat and Supermarket News differ)
• Independent data on how much spill detection reduced accidents (about 40 a day is Stop & Shop’s own figure)
• Its height (6 ft 3 in versus 7 ft)