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Dark and difficult times lie ahead. Soon, America’s middle class must come to the realization that the country’s largest employer–Walmart is quietly testing an army of robots that soon will replace their jobs. The latest installment is an autonomous floor scrubber being tested at five store locations near the company’s headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas.
The autonomous cleaning robot dubbed Emma, an A.I. navigated system capable of operating floor care equipment on nightshifts, is able to clean the entire store front without human interaction. San Diego-based startup Brain Corp., works with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop novel machine learning algorithms that focus on taking jobs from middle class Americans. BrainOS is the company’s flagship product that enables robots to “perceive their environments, control motion, and navigate using visual cues and landmarks, while seeing and avoiding people and obstacles”.