Seven-Eleven Japan partners with Telexistence on AI Robots

Telexistence Inc. (TX) and Seven-Eleven Japan Co., Ltd. SEJ announced a partnership to develop, validate, and deploy humanoid robots using generative AI. The project aims to develop ‘Astra,’ a humanoid robot. It will use a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) foundation model. The goal is to deploy Astra in Seven-Eleven stores by 2029.

Shaping the Future of Retail

TX and SEJ are using Astra in real stores. This helps them tackle high labor costs and staff shortages. At the same time, it improves the customer experience. Robots will manage routine in-store tasks. This lets employees focus on skills that only humans have. As a result, the store becomes more appealing and creates new value for customers.

Background and Scope of the Partnership

Labor shortages and challenges hit retail hard. Seven-Eleven Japan is putting money into automation and tech that saves labor. This partnership builds on those efforts. It aims to improve operations and change how convenience store employees work.

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The collaboration centers on three key initiatives:

• Identifying store operations that can be automated and checking how well they work.
• Creating humanoid robots built for real store environments.
• Gathering big datasets helps enhance VLA model training and deployment.

The partnership with the AI Robot Association (AIRoA) will speed up dataset development. It will also help in deploying AI-powered robots.

AIRoA’s leaders are:

• Professor Tetsuya Ogata from Waseda University
• Professor Yutaka Matsuo from the University of Tokyo
• Toyota Motor Corporation
• TX

Leveraging Large-Scale Real-World Motion Data

テレグジスタンス operates a large data collection platform with its beverage restocking robot, Ghost. Merging TX’s platform with SEJ’s network of 20,000 stores will provide unbeatable training resources for VLA models. This blend of perception, planning, and control can boost humanoid robot use. It will help deploy them on a large scale faster and better than any competitor.