Do you mean fully automated? I think it's the pick/place of irregular objects that's the problem.
In the UK, grocery deliveries are pretty cheap and available widely.
I actually just looked up ocado to show you a video of the human packers and found that mid last year they were running a fully automated warehouse, and then that it burned down about a month ago.
Yeah, that is very interesting about it. Also interesting is that it is an endoskeleton with a soft outer hull that is more similar to flesh than the hard rubber cover that you sometimes seen on "traditional" robotic grippers.
One could describe this device as replacing eye-muscle and (position, pressure) sensor-muscle feedback with cleverly engineered mechanical compliance. So much for solved problems in motion planning...
Teflon is one of the most slippery solid materials we know.
google sells advertisement for insurance companies and real estate and is in the press for phones or moonshot projects.
The big questions that come to mind are resilience or I guess you could call it MTBF, and also hygiene.
A human hand knows when a thing it picks up has gotten it dirty and can change a glove or go wash. This design in particular looks like it would hang on to particles from things it’s picked up (thinking like bits of broccoli, but also on the microscopic level) and be very difficult to clean with all that surface area.
I think for picking groceries you would almost have to dedicate one arm for each SKU placing items into bags that were ferried by, you could not have one arm with a bag moving between SKUs and filling that bag.
I fully expect to see lights out grocery stores in the near future, I’m a bit surprised no one has tried it yet. Maybe the last mile delivery still dominates the cost too much.