A shelf-cooperative robotic system for automated stocking and disposal in convenience stores

This paper presents an automated retail system for stocking and disposal tasks that integrates robots with an actively actuated electric display shelf. Conventional retail automation has mainly focused on enhancing robot-side perception and manipulation; however, frequent layout changes and variations in product placement make long-term stable operation difficult when task complexity is handled solely by robots. To address this issue, we propose a shelf–robot integrated system design that structures task conditions through hardware configuration and explicit role allocation. The proposed system consists of a 6-DoF robotic arm for non-structured manipulation, a custom-built 3-DoF Cartesian robot for repetitive display tasks, and an electric shelf equipped with vertical motion, forward/backward motion, and conveyor mechanisms. A key contribution of this study is a shelf-integrated batch receiving concept that enables products to be transferred and received as a group without individual grasping. In addition, a multi-item simultaneous grasping strategy enables efficient stocking with a minimal number of pick-and-place cycles. Experimental validation under competition-based task rules demonstrates that the proposed system achieves stable and repeatable retail stocking and disposal operations.