Robotic Clerks: Autonomous Shelf Refilling

Nowadays, robots are used in the retail market mostly for warehousing, while they could be of great help in different in-store logistics processes as discussed in previous chapters. The present chapter deals with the shelf replenishment task; its execution by a robot requires overcoming of technological and methodological barriers in the handling of single products rather than the boxes containing them. The challenges a robot has to face to replenish a supermarket shelf are all related to manipulation in narrow spaces of products with a large variety of size, shape, weight, and fragility. The solution proposed by REFILLS is based on a robotic system where perception is used at all hierarchical levels of the control architecture, from high-level task planning algorithms and motion planning to reactive control layers based on physics models, where tactile and visual perception are combined to achieve highly reliable manipulation of items. Experiments in an emulated supermarket shelf are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.