Customers move stuff around, people steal things, and sometimes product falls through the cracks.
"There is a fundamental challenge in knowing what's in a store and where," Sarjoun Skaff, Bossa Nova Robotics' cofounder and chief technology officer, told Business Insider in a recent interview. Essentially, Bossa Nova has built a mini self-driving car with an enormous camera on top that uses computer vision to see like a human does.
Bossa Nova works closely with Carnegie Mellon University, and it is even funding a biometrics lab affiliated with the school. "We are actually working at scale in stores today, which means that we have hit the minimum percentage — which is very high — that our customers imposed on us," he said.