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Main Authors: Peron, Davide, Fernandez-Ayala, Victor Nan, Segelmark, Lukas
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11740
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author Peron, Davide
Fernandez-Ayala, Victor Nan
Segelmark, Lukas
author_facet Peron, Davide
Fernandez-Ayala, Victor Nan
Segelmark, Lukas
contents Autonomous stocking in retail environments, particularly supermarkets, presents challenges due to dynamic human interactions, constrained spaces, and diverse product geometries. This paper introduces an efficient end-to-end robotic system for autonomous shelf stocking and fronting, integrating commercially available hardware with a scalable algorithmic architecture. A major contribution of this work is the system integration of off-the-shelf hardware and ROS2-based perception, planning, and control into a single deployable platform for retail environments. Our solution leverages Behavior Trees (BTs) for task planning, fine-tuned vision models for object detection, and a two-step Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework for precise shelf navigation using ArUco markers. Laboratory experiments replicating realistic supermarket conditions demonstrate reliable performance, achieving over 98% success in pick-and-place operations across a total of more than 700 stocking events. However, our comparative benchmarks indicate that the performance and cost-effectiveness of current autonomous systems remain inferior to that of human workers, which we use to highlight key improvement areas and quantify the progress still required before widespread commercial deployment can realistically be achieved.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_11740
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From Pixels to Shelf: End-to-End Algorithmic Control of a Mobile Manipulator for Supermarket Stocking and Fronting
Peron, Davide
Fernandez-Ayala, Victor Nan
Segelmark, Lukas
Robotics
Autonomous stocking in retail environments, particularly supermarkets, presents challenges due to dynamic human interactions, constrained spaces, and diverse product geometries. This paper introduces an efficient end-to-end robotic system for autonomous shelf stocking and fronting, integrating commercially available hardware with a scalable algorithmic architecture. A major contribution of this work is the system integration of off-the-shelf hardware and ROS2-based perception, planning, and control into a single deployable platform for retail environments. Our solution leverages Behavior Trees (BTs) for task planning, fine-tuned vision models for object detection, and a two-step Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework for precise shelf navigation using ArUco markers. Laboratory experiments replicating realistic supermarket conditions demonstrate reliable performance, achieving over 98% success in pick-and-place operations across a total of more than 700 stocking events. However, our comparative benchmarks indicate that the performance and cost-effectiveness of current autonomous systems remain inferior to that of human workers, which we use to highlight key improvement areas and quantify the progress still required before widespread commercial deployment can realistically be achieved.
title From Pixels to Shelf: End-to-End Algorithmic Control of a Mobile Manipulator for Supermarket Stocking and Fronting
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11740