Development of an Environmentally Independent Mobile Manipulation System for Product Disposal in Retail Stores

Abstract

Robotic systems are being used to automate convenience stores and retail stores, including competitions such as the World Robot Summit. Many of the systems that have been proposed so far are environmentally dependent, such as putting markers on product packages or using motorized shelves modified from existing shelves and are not easy to implement in stores. Therefore, we proposed a system to dispose of products with as few changes to the environment as possible. To realize the system, we proposed three approaches: markerless product disposal, autonomous movement with navigation, and customer detection with sensors that can be placed at any position. We conducted verification based on real convenience store scenarios and discussed the insights and challenges obtained from it.