Zippedi robots digitize inventory for last-mile delivery – TechCrunch

Luis Vera believes the third time is the charm. The self-proclaimed serial entrepreneur admits that his vision for digitizing retail was a decade or two early when he started his journey in the 90s. Through a pair of startups -- Prospect and SCOPIX -- he tried a variety of methods to help capture store inventory, including placings cameras on shelves and a ceiling-based system where one ran on tracks. He was, effectively, attempting to compete with Amazon well before Amazon was, well, Amazon -- at least in any meaningful sense. Computer vision, machine learning and the like have caught up a lot since then, of course.