Autonomous order fulfillment in grocery stores is a particularly good way to drive the robot project development of mobile manipulation capabilities because it encompasses a host of difficult challenges for robots, including perceiving and manipulating a large variety of objects, navigating an ever-changing environment, and reacting to unexpected circumstances. A single shopping run can contain a long list of items, so this task requires the system to be reliable and encourages a focus on overall execution speed.

This robot is based on TRI’s custom robot actuators of different sizes, as well as the software ecosystem to support them. These actuators are the components that move every joint of the robot — they steer the wheels, move the 5 degrees-of-freedom (DOF) torso, move the two 7 DOF arms and control the neck.

Source: Toyota Research Institute