Retail Store Robot: ABB, Pepper and Shelf Scanners

A retail store robot today usually does one of two jobs. It rolls down the aisles at night or between shoppers, photographing shelves to find empty spots and wrong prices, or it stands near the door and talks to customers. Both kinds made news in September 2026. This post goes back to the clerks who fetched goods from behind the counter and the first self-service grocery, then to Pepper and the early shelf scanners, and finally to where ABB robots fit, from a coffee bar in a London department store to the warehouses that stock the shelves.

A Bossa Nova shelf scanning robot in a Walmart aisle, 2019. Photo: Saucy / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

How shop work moved from clerks to self-service and the first robots

For most of retail history the customer did not touch the goods. In a general store or grocery a clerk stood behind the counter, took the order, fetched each item from the shelves and wrapped it. That changed in 1916, when Clarence Saunders opened the first Piggly Wiggly in Memphis, Tennessee. Shoppers took a basket, walked a fixed path through the aisles, picked the goods themselves and paid at a checkout.

Inside a general store in 1938, where clerks fetched goods from the shelves. Photo: Russell Lee, FSA / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Self-service moved most of the fetching to the customer, but it left the store staff with two jobs no shopper does: keeping shelves full and labeled, and answering questions. Both grew as stores got bigger. Staff walked the aisles with clipboards and later with handheld scanners to count stock and check price tags, slow work that has to be repeated every day. When a shopper could not find something, someone still had to walk them to the right aisle. These were the jobs that store robots were later built to take over.

An aisle in a Piggly Wiggly self-service store, 1917 to 1918. Photo: Clarence Saunders via Library of Congress / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Robots first entered stores as greeters. SoftBank unveiled Pepper, a child sized humanoid with a tablet on its chest, in Tokyo on 5 June 2014, and the next day it was greeting customers in SoftBank Mobile phone shops. Pepper went on sale in 2015 and turned up in banks, shops and restaurants, but production paused in June 2021 because of weak demand. Shelf scanning took a similar path. Walmart began testing Bossa Nova's scanning robots in 2017 and planned to have them in 1,000 stores, then ended the contract in November 2020 after finding, Reuters reported, that its own workers could do much the same checks.

A SoftBank Pepper robot greeting shoppers at an EDION electronics store in Namba, Osaka, 2019. Photo: Tokumeigakarinoaoshima / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Retail store robots in 2026: shelf scanners and humanoid sales staff

Shelf scanning has since found its footing. On 21 September 2026 Simbe said it had passed 3,000 autonomous units under contract, about a decade after it introduced its Tally robot. Simbe says its robots have analyzed 45 billion shelf photos and scanned 18 billion price tags, across more than 75 retail chains in nearly a dozen countries. In mid September Tally started work at a Fred Meyer store in Tacoma, Washington, one of several Kroger owned Fred Meyer stores getting the robot. It maps the aisles and flags gaps, wrong prices and misplaced products. The workers' union, UFCW 3000, filed a grievance over the rollout.

A Bossa Nova robot scanning shelves at a Walmart store, 2019. Photo: Saucy / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Humanoid sales assistants are back as well. On 28 September 2026 AGIBOT and the Chinese cookware maker ASD said they had put 100 AGIBOT X2 humanoid robots into 100 ASD stores in China. The robots greet customers, ask about household size, cooking habits and budget, recommend a pan and guide shoppers around the store. Questions about promotions, stock and payment go to a human sales associate. The companies ran 10 hour livestreams from stores in Wenling, Shanghai and Wuxi to show the robots on a normal business day.

A Pepper robot greeting visitors at the PALO store in Kyobashi, 2018. Photo: Tokumeigakarinoaoshima / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB does not sell a shelf scanner or a humanoid, but it has put a robot in front of shoppers. From August to December 2018 ABB's dual arm YuMi made coffee for customers at the Smartech store in Selfridges, London. YuMi was a good fit because it is a collaborative robot built to work close to people without a fence. Our post on robot-run convenience stores covers stores where robots do more of the selling, and robot bartenders covers the drinks side.

ABB's YuMi making coffee for shoppers at the Smartech store in Selfridges, London, 2018. Photo: ABB

Where retail store robots go next, on the floor and in the back room

On the shop floor, the next few years will probably bring more scanners and a slow test of humanoids. Scanners have a clear payback, since prices and empty shelves are easy to measure. Humanoid assistants still have to prove that shoppers like them and that they sell more. Behind the shop floor there is room for industrial robots. A store back room or a small warehouse could use an autonomous mobile robot such as ABB's Flexley Mover to move cages and totes, though ABB has not announced a store project of this kind, so it remains a possibility.

An ABB Flexley Mover P603, a compact mobile robot for loads up to 1,500 kg. Photo: ABB

Much of what shoppers buy never passes a store shelf at all. Online orders from fashion and grocery retailers are picked and packed in distribution centers, and that is where ABB's retail work sits today. In 2025 ABB added the Robotic Fashion Inductor and Robotic Parcel Inductor to its Item Picking family. Both use ABB's AI vision to pick unknown, randomly placed items such as bagged clothes and place them on a sorter, with ABB quoting picking accuracy above 99.5 percent. People who order from home never see these robots, but a picker like this may well have handled their parcel.

ABB's Robotic Fashion Inductor picks bagged items and places them on a sorter. Photo: ABB

The open problems are money and people. A fleet of robots has to pay for itself in fewer empty shelves or more sales. Shoppers and workers have to accept robots in the aisles, and the Walmart reversal and the Fred Meyer grievance show that acceptance is not automatic. A robot has to stay safe in crowded aisles with children and carts, which is why slow speeds and stop sensors matter more in a store than in a factory. Stores also need staff who can look after the robots. In warehouses, engineers usually plan and test a picking cell first in RobotStudio before it goes live.

An ABB robot with a suction gripper from the AI powered Item Picking family. Photo: ABB

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