Sam’s Club keeps the floors clean – with help from robots

A leading warehouse club retailer is expanding its investment in robotic floor scrubbing technology.

Sam’s Club is adding 372 Tennant T7AMR autonomous floor scrubbers to the hundreds of units it already deploys. The Tennant robots are automated by the Brain Corp. BrainOS artificial intelligence (AI) platform. As a result, Sam’s Club will have a robotic scrubber in every one of its nearly 600 U.S. stores.

Sam’s Club parent Walmart has been using BrainOS-powered Tennant automated scrubbers in at least 1,800 stores across the U.S. since 2019. And Midwestern grocer Schnuck Markets Inc. recently began deploying new Tennant T380AMR robotic scrubbers, powered by the BrainOS platform.

The retailer expects to be able to deploy the BrainOS-powered machines quickly, without requiring any expensive custom engineering. They are also designed to be adjusted to meet changing operational requirements, such as different store layouts, without additional technical support.

In addition, Sam’s club is expanding a retail shelf analytics pilot using Brain Corp.’s floor scrubber accessory for localizing and analyzing shelf inventory, with the goal of improving in-store shopping experiences. Following a successful six-month proof of concept, Sam’s Club made the decision to expand this program. A cloud-connected application helps verify pricing accuracy, confirm planogram compliance, and ensure product availability without requiring time-consuming and potentially inaccurate manual processes.

The Brain Corp. application leverages a dual function design in which a data collection and scanning accessory can be mounted on a robot, in this case, robotic floor scrubbers.