The robot was late. Fifty minutes late. Or was it?

“It’s autonomous,” said Tyler Bursey, manager of the 205,000-square-foot Walmart Supercenter in North Richland Hills in northern Tarrant County. “We can’t make it start sooner than it wants to.”

The Bossa Nova shelf-scanning robot stood docked to its electrical source in a hallway leading to the store’s back room, where its cohort, the Fast Unloader robot, lives. The two machines can communicate, but more about that later.

Photographers were ready, waiting to record the pear-shaped robot with dozens of eyes made by San Francisco-based Bossa Nova Robotics start one of two runs it makes every 24 hours.

At 12:50 p.m., the confident robot whirs to life and begins looking for every store manager’s dreaded inventory problem — out-of-stock items.

After almost a year of programming and testing the robot that checks for empty spots on shelves, Walmart is rolling out 300 of them to stores nationwide. That includes 25 in Texas and 12 in Dallas-Fort Worth.

It’s also purchased 1,500 floor cleaning robots, 1,200 Fast Unloaders and 900 more pickup towers for national deployment. Walmart is spending $11 billion this year on its global business.

In Texas, the retailer plans to spend $264.9 million in 2019 on smart machines, store remodels and expanding online grocery delivery and pickup to more stores as it battles for market share with Amazon and Target and major grocery chains Kroger, Albertsons and H-E-B.

Walmart is mainstreaming technology to make its stores more productive by shifting employees from repetitive or taxing work to new jobs, such as personal shoppers filling online orders to be picked up or delivered to customers.

Bursey, who volunteered his store as a test lab, can quantify the results. He had 300 employees before the robots arrived and that hasn’t changed. But here’s what has changed.

In a Walmart Supercenter that carries multiples of 120,000 items, improving the store’s overall in-stock rate to 96% from 94% in three months is not a small thing. It’s actually huge.

Bossa Nova’s dance

The awakened Bossa Nova heads through the shoe department and over to the diaper aisle. There’s a big blue cart parked in its way, left by a curbside pickup personal shopper.

No time to waste, the robot decides it’ll swing by later. It heads to the laundry detergent aisle. Its bright lights turn on for the camera lenses strategically positioned up and down its tower. It turns what it’s capturing into data and messages appear on handheld devices that store employees have with them. In between manually fixing the identified out-of-stocks, employees can help customers.

“The associates had to scan the whole aisle before,” Bursey said.

The robot’s message includes whether an item is stored on the top shelf and just needs to be moved down to customer level or if the product is in the storeroom.

It also identifies “true outs,” meaning there’s none in the backroom either. That’s when it notifies Fast Unloader.

Fast Unloader is a stationary robot that scans arriving boxes as they’re manually unloaded from a docked truck. It has a long conveyor extending from it and shorter offshoot shelves come out on either side with carts stationed at the ends. As boxes move down the long conveyor, they are rerouted to their correct cart.

Without Fast Unloader, it takes nine to 10 people two hours to unload 2,500 to 3,000 cases off a truck. With Fast Unloader, it’s done with half as many people. That adds 10 more employee hours on the floor, Bursey said, “instead of being tied up back here.”

There’s one special cart for all those “true outs” and employees get the messages on their handhelds.

Bossa Nova’s midnight run helps early crews of personal shoppers filling online orders by having shelves in good shape for them to pick. Its midday run makes sure shelves are stocked for the rush of customers stopping in on their way home from work, Bursey explained.

The handhelds also notify employees that a new online order needs to be put inside the big orange pickup tower, which is actually a vending machine that dispenses orders when customers wave a bar code they received by email. Employees are also notified when the order includes an item that’s too big to store in the tower and they meet the shoppers when they arrive.

Emma’s turn

Besides Bossa Nova and Fast Unloader, there’s one other robot in store and it gets a human name.

A floor sweeper that store workers call Emma cleans one of 60 routes at a time. Though programmed to go around obstacles, it can get stuck.

Emma can text workers a photo of where it is, Bursey said. Emma runs about eight hours a night and charges all day.

The night maintenance crew that works alongside Emma is still at least six people. So the robot isn’t taking a human’s job.

“It’s great to see all this,” said Bursey, who has been with Walmart for 10 years. “And we were glad to be paving the way for other stores.”

About halfway through the shelf scanning, employees start receiving Bossa Nova’s results. Is the robot ever wrong? “No,” he said. “It’s very good.”

Twitter: @MariaHalkias