The Future of Retail is Born at SMU

L-R: Mohammad Rahimipour; Professor Adel Merabet; Lucas Orychock; Uzair Tahir; Abhishek Vijayakumar Latha; Francis Kuzhippallil

Written by Alex Phillips

Thumbnail Photo: Uzair Tahir 

All Image Credit: Lisa Neily/Mary Ellen Beazley

This month I got the opportunity to speak with two graduate students here at Saint Mary’s University who are completing their master’s in Applied Science: Mohammad Rahimipour and Uzair Tahir. For the last three months, they have been working on a retail robot in their lab in McNally Main with Dr. Adel Merabet. Rahimipour has a background in mechanical engineering and when he joined this project, he completely reworked the robot into the version that it is now. As of now, he is the only student that is working on it full-time. Tahir has been working on this project for about three months at the time of publication. 

The project began in 2019 with the first version of the robot. “I had been contacted by Dr. Ramesh Venkat, Director of the David Sobey Centre for Innovation in Retailing & Services,” said Dr. Adel Merabet, “they were looking to initiate a project with Engineering about applying robotics in a retail environment.” They then discussed possible ideas such as planogram compliance, tag and product identification, price compliance, and shelf out-of-stock detection, all of which this robot is designed to do. 

So what exactly does this robot do? It’s designed to move autonomously through a store’s aisles, taking images of the shelves and products. With three cameras, it can take a picture of all the shelves at once and send it to another computer. From there, one task it can perform is to determine what items have been misplaced or if a stock is empty or running low. Right now, they are working on improving the navigation system of the robot. For example, how it reacts in crowded environments, what to do when someone steps in front of it, and how it reacts to different lighting. They are constantly working on improving the robot; in fact, it is now in its third version.

“The next step for this robot is to test it in a real store setting,” said Rahimipour. They have been testing it in a mock setting of shelves and products that they have set up in their lab, but they want to take it to the next level. This will include testing it on bigger products in a bigger environment. In order to get the robot ready for a real store, they will need to add a product database and improve the navigation system. “The real store experimentation will help us to assess the capabilities of the robot and check if any update is needed,” Dr. Merabet said, “the current objective of the project is to build a prototype to allow students from different engineering, computer science, and other disciplines to be involved in multidisciplinary projects.” 

As for the end goal? Uzair Tahir said that they want to see the project commercialized and out in the community at stores. Tahir further stated that this robot would cut costs in stores and do the hard and tedious work, leaving the easier part of the job to humans to do, such as restocking and replacing the misplaced items. “It would be difficult to incorporate this because it is more efficient than humans,” Tahir said. “It will wander the retail store and tell employees and the manager that some of the items are missing.” Regardless, the plan for the retail robot is commercialization. Dr. Merabet’s vision for the robot consists of one or two that can navigate a store comfortably without the interference of customers or each other. The robots are not limited by the amount of hours they can put in; therefore, they can be running for extended periods of time while updating the store’s inventory constantly.

There is plenty of debate surrounding the role of robots within stores, given that they can take the place of a person, such as the self-checkouts that are common in most grocery stores. So, what part does this retail robot play in that debate? “I don’t think that the robots will replace humans, but it will help them,” Rahimipour assures us. The robot is designed to leave the tedious tasks to the robots while the more complex tasks are performed by humans. Dr. Merabet commented on the matter as well, saying, “Using robots will create the need for other duties that can be done by workers such as building a database that includes all images and information about the products in the store and upgrading that database.” Implementing these robots into stores can provide new opportunities for workers. Rather than wandering the aisles and taking inventory, workers can instead be tasked with keeping the robot and its databases up-to-date. That may sound daunting, but it is nothing that a little bit of training wouldn’t be able to help with! Who knows, maybe one day you will see these robots roaming your local grocery store, and you’ll get to say “My school invented that.”