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I don't know how long ago "once" is, or how big this client was, but every modern large grocery company is pretty data-driven, especially about where products a

I don't know how long ago "once" is, or how big this client was, but every modern large grocery company is pretty data-driven, especially about where products are placed. Lots of places have robots crawling the aisles in real time updating stocking information and taking video/images of product presentation on the shelves. They are presented as "cleanup robots" and they put googly eyes on them and a name tag or whatever. I even once asked several employees about them, and they just shrugged and said "yeah it's the cleaning robot." But it's a column 6 ft high it's not a roomba. It has a clearly visible array of cameras on each side, and who knows what other sensors. Check out this image search, for "grocery data cleanup robot": https://www.google.com/search?q=grocery+data+cleanup+robot&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS769US769&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiI2-qE-obpAhWlT98KHYWlAnAQ_AUoAXoECDUQAw&biw=1920&bih=937 https://www.google.com/search?q=grocery+data+cleanup+robot&r...

EsotericAlgo 6y ago
This is true but generally only for grocery and a handful of the big box retailers. The merchandising information is typically well known along with product taxonomy, but the mapping of this relative information to a physical layout isn't always cleanly implemented or available. A typical scenario is sku 85111 is grouped in a product hierarchy (family > sub category > subdepartment > department or the retailer equivalent) and that sku is assigned to a planogram or set of planograms associated with a display fixture (which sometimes have a hierarchy of their own (e.g. peg > shelf > section > aisle) with mixed relative distancing. There's generally a departmental divide between who manages product and merchandising information. Many of these robots to my knowledge use the products or special tags as unique identifiers as opposed to an indoor-positioning system that ties back to an exact product location. So it's frequently easy to say that a product is in aisle 20 section 2 shelf 1 it's not easy to say from your current location go down 8 aisle and up half an aisle, look on your left.

EsotericAlgo 6y ago

This is true but generally only for grocery and a handful of the big box retailers. The merchandising information is typically well known along with product taxonomy, but the mapping of this relative information to a physical layout isn't always cleanly implemented or available. A typical scenario is sku 85111 is grouped in a product hierarchy (family > sub category > subdepartment > department or the retailer equivalent) and that sku is assigned to a planogram or set of planograms associated with a display fixture (which sometimes have a hierarchy of their own (e.g. peg > shelf > section > aisle) with mixed relative distancing. There's generally a departmental divide between who manages product and merchandising information. Many of these robots to my knowledge use the products or special tags as unique identifiers as opposed to an indoor-positioning system that ties back to an exact product location. So it's frequently easy to say that a product is in aisle 20 section 2 shelf 1 it's not easy to say from your current location go down 8 aisle and up half an aisle, look on your left.