Remote retail monitoring and stock assessment using mobile robots

Abstract

This paper describes a Virtual Reality (VR) based system for automating data collection and surveying in a retail store using mobile robots. The manpower cost for surveying and monitoring the shelves in retail stores are high, because of which these activities are not repeated frequently causing reduced customer satisfaction and loss of revenue. Further, the accuracy of data collected may be improved by avoiding human related factors. We use a mobile robot platform with on-board cameras to monitor the shelves either autonomously or through tele-operation. A remote operator can control the robot from a console which shows a 3D of view of the store as well as, capture real images and videos of the store. The robot is designed to facilitate automatic detection of Out-of-Stock (OOS) situations. It would be possible for a single operator to control multiple robots placed at different stores thus optimizing the available resources. As the deployment of the proposed system does not require modifying existing infrastructure of the store, the cost of the entire solution is cheaper with shorter return-on-investment (ROI) period.

Retail Robot Navigation: A Shopper Behavior-Centric Approach to Path Planning

“…Using mobile robots for retail monitoring has been pioneered by Priya Narasimhan's group at Carnegie Mellon University with their AndyVision project [8]. Kumar et al [9] proposed a Virtual Reality (VR) based system for automating data collection and surveying in a retail store using tele-operated mobile robots and, later a novel method for obtaining product count directly from images recorded using a monocular camera mounted on a mobile robot [10]. Song et al [11] recently studied the impact of a recommender service robot in both customer behavior and store performance, demonstrating a positive impact.…”

Shopping Wagon: A Smart Shopping System Using RFID for Shopping Malls

“…Introduction of this clever carts can be quite attractive withinside the retail zone and could result in a brand-new generation of purchasing and promoting of goods. It may be taken into consideration an affordable desire for capability retails for the reason that key hassle it addresses is saving the consumers time [7][8][9].…”

CAMbot: Customer assistance mobile manipulator robot

“…M. Garcia-Arroyo, et.al [5] has presented the design of the customer retail robot. In 2014 Swagat Kumar et.al has presented [6] a Remote Retail Monitoring and Stock Assessment Mobile Robot that uses a virtual reality (VR) system for automating data collection and surveying in a retail store. The paper proposed that accurate data collection is possible by using robots since it avoids human errors.…”