Development of automatic opening and closing shelf for convenience stores in cooperation with collaborative robot

ABSTRACT In recent years, there have been many attempts to automate convenience stores with robots, including competitions such as the World Robot Summit, but there are still many technical hurdles to the practical application of robots on their own. To solve this problem, Kanazawa Institute of Technology and Sankyo Tateyama, Inc. TateyamaAdvance-Company, Ltd. have jointly developed an automatic opening and closing shelf that works with a cooperative robot for the display and disposal of products in convenience stores. The automatic opening and closing shelves can be remotely operated by a robot and perform cooperative display task with the robot. We experimentally verified the usefulness of the system as infrastructure to work with robots. The results confirmed the usefulness of the automatic opening and closing of shelves for automating convenience stores with robots and clarified the technical requirements for the next generation of sliding shelves. GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT