It would probably mean that the camera would either have to hang down pretty low in the isles or the isles would need to be super wide so that the camera could get a good view angle of the entire shelf, including bottom rows. But sure I suppose they probably could have something that rides around on a track on the ceiling and raises and lowers to get into position in each isle.

Like Oto (sp?) from Wall-E?

Because robots look cooler. Also, I imagine it’s probably doing some stuff with depth perception crap and what have you.

They already do it at POS.

Lots of store websites have a feature where you select a location and it tells you whether a product is in stock or not (and often how much is in stock).

The more interesting question to me is why the robot has to go scan the shelves at the time you ask, when there could just be one (purpose-built) robot that walks the shelves once per night and builds up a model of the entire store that gets used by the other robots for the rest of the day. The hospitality robots wouldn’t even need to be able to see the shelves; they’d just need to be able to guide themselves to the right coordinates in the store and say “it should be right in front of me.”

What hospitality robots are you talking about? Does Walmart have hospitality robots? I only saw the stock scanning robot in the article.

But then you would have to spend lots of money of redesigning ceilings, having regular maintenance work done, etc.