When you order a product on GAP or Amazon or any other online retailer, there are actual

people on the other side picking and sorting products for you. It is a huge cost for because
retailers have to pay them, it takes a longer time to sort products and most warehouses can’t
function 24/7.
GAP is testing and working with Kindered AI to train robots to pick and sort its products.

Your next pair of Gap jeans may be delivered with the help of a high-tech robot.

Kindred, a robotics startup whose investors include Alphabet executive chairman

Eric Schmidt’s venture capital fund, has signed up Gap Inc. (GPS, -2.46%) as a trial
customer in one of its Tennessee warehouses. It’s a big win for the three -year-old
Kindred, which also said Tuesday that it had scored $28 million in funding led by
Chinese tech giant Tencent, bringing its total funding to $44 million.

Kindred’s new customer and investment highlights the growing trend of companies
like Amazon (AMZN, -0.55%) and Target (TGT, -0.61%) using robots to move
warehouse inventory and track items on store shelves. Several robot analysts cite
Amazon’s $775 million purchase of robot maker Kiva Systems in 2012 as a turning
point for retailers and other companies, not just automakers or industrial
manufactures, in adopting robots.

Kindred’s robot, which sorts items that are shuttled to it by a conveyor belt, looks
like one of those old arcade games that involve the use of a claw attached to a crane
to pick up plastic trinkets. The robot’s arm can pick up packages containing things
like t-shirts, pants, and sunglasses that are dropped off inside its glass -paneled
enclosure, swivel, and then place those items in their designated drop -off zones that
resemble little mailboxes.

Get Data Sheet, Fortune’s technology newsletter.

Kindred co-founder and product chief George Babu said Gap has been testing the
robot for a couple of months and that it’s now “processing real orders” by helping
humans separate items like jeans and t-shirts for delivery. He declined to say how
many robots Gap is testing in the warehouse, only to say “there are a few and there
will be more.”

Currently, Kindred’s staff in Canada (the company has offices in Vancouver, Toronto,
and San Francisco) work remotely to help Gap train the robots’ software for the
automated work in Tennessee. Kindred developed the underlying software that
powers the the robotic arms, built by the Japaneserobotics company Fanuc, Babu
said. If there’s any problems on the assembly line, Kindred staff can notif y the
appropriate warehouse operator, Babu explained.

Using custom software, Kindred’s workers manipulate the robots like they’re playing
a video game. Each time a Kindred employee moves the robotic arm to pick up a
particular item, the software records that data so that the robot can eventually learn
to operate without human control.

Kindred Software

Unlike the robots of yesteryear, Kindred’s robots are designed to improve over time
using a subset of artificial intelligence called deep learning, Babu said. While
companies like Google (GOOG, +0.17%) and Facebook (FB, -0.11%) use deep
learning to help sift through data and do tasks like automatically recognizing images
like cats in photos, Kindred’s robots use deep learning to help them remember “what
is a good grasp,” said Babu.

For example, the robotic arm, is supposed to automatically grab a pair of sunglasses
more gently than jeans.

The robot also uses an AI technology called reinforcement learning that helps it
figure out the best way to pick up and move objects to their drop-off spots. It’s a
technique that’s currently used by Google to establish the best settings in its data
centers to conserve energy, as Jeff Dean, Google’s head of its Brain research team
and a Kindred investor, previously told Fortune.
Kindred has assembled some of the leading figures in modern-day AI as advisors,
including Yoshua Bengio who also advises Microsoft (MSFT, +1.36%) on AI
technology, University of Alberta professor and reinforcement learning expert
Richard Sutton, and Apple (AAPL, -1.32%) AI chief and Carnegie Mellon University
professor Ruslan Salakhutdinov. University of Guelph professor and machine
learning expert Graham Taylor, also a Kindred co-founder who no longer works for
the company, is also an advisor, Babu said.

Kindred said that it is testing its robots with other retailers in addition to Gap, but it
declined to name them.

Babu is aware that some people may worry that companies will eventually use robots
to replace human workers. Despite that perception, he said there’s actually a “big
shortage” of warehouse workers and that the lack of manpower is keeping retailers
from growing as quickly as they want to.

“I believe that we as a country have to start getting away from how [robotics are]
going to take away jobs,” Babu said. Companies and U.S. policy makers should
instead focus on “how to retrain people” so that they can use the latest technology
and work alongside robots.

Eclipse Ventures and First Round Capital also participated in the company’s latest
funding round. Other investors include the venture capital firm Data Collective; GV
(formerly Google Ventures); Ilya Sutskever, the research director of AI research
group OpenAI; Innovation Endeavors (Eric Schmidt’s VC fund); and AME Cloud
Ventures (led by Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang).