They mark daily life in Japan. By 2025, more than 58,000 konbini, these convenience stores open day and night, will be found throughout the Land of the Rising Sun. In Tokyo or Osaka it is impossible to take ten steps without running into one. The three giants Seven-Eleven, with its 21,500 stores, FamilyMart and Lawson largely dominate this market, while other brands such as Ministop, Daily Yamazaki and NewDays complete the picture.
But in some of them a strange ballet appeared. No more traditional warehouse workers… make way for robots. These AI-powered automata are designed by Tokyo startup Telexistence and run on Nvidia and Microsoft platforms. Since 2022, the company has deployed these machines in the backroom of more than 300 FamilyMart and Lawson stores in Tokyo. He also plans to use them at 7-Elevens soon.
Don’t look for employees hiding in the back room controlling these robots, or even control centers in Japan. To do this you have to travel a few thousand kilometers further south.
The technology magazine Rest of World made a curious report. Inside a multi-story office building in Manila’s financial district, around sixty young men and women monitor and control robots that replenish the shelves of convenience stores in distant Japan.
Relocation to the Philippines
Sometimes, when a robot drops a can, a teleoperator “puts on a virtual reality headset and takes control with joysticks to pick it up again.” Telexistence’s robots are remotely controlled 24/7 by Astro Robotics employees, with each “pilot” simultaneously controlling about fifty machines.
This outsourcing “benefits young, tech-savvy Filipinos” but has its major limitations. Pilots typically have contracts and are paid less than their counterparts in more developed countries. Each teleoperator earns between $250 and $315 a month, about the same as a call center agent, according to one employee.
“It is difficult to find workers to stack in Japan,” Juan Paolo Villonco, founder of the new company, told Rest of the World. “If you find one who accepts, it will be very expensive. The minimum wage is quite high.”
However, the dematerialization of the warehouse worker is not without effects. Health problems are common. The intensive use of virtual reality headsets often causes dizziness and disorientation, a phenomenon called cybersickness, as each operator takes control of the robot about 50 times a day.
A broader goal
Teleoperation companies not only dream of automating konbini. These interventions also serve to train the robots to be completely independent. Telexistence has accumulated over the years “a large amount of data and unique knowledge in terms of integrated teleoperation”, which it transmits to the San Francisco start-up Physical Intelligence to develop AI models that provide robots with “physical intelligence” capable of grasping and manipulating objects like a human… and above all alone.
“Filipinos are developing tools that could replace them later. Technology should improve their work and efficiency, not serve to maximize profits abroad,” Xian Guevarra, general secretary of the Computer Professionals Union, which represents engineers and computer scientists in the Philippines, finally told Rest of World. Prophetic?
Source: BFM TV
