The paper describes the system development approach followed by researchers and engineers of the team NAIST-RITS-Panasonic (Japan) for their participation in the Future Convenience Store Challenge 2018, 2019 trials and 2020 (held in 2021). This international competition is about the development of robotic capabilities to execute complex tasks for retail automation. The team built four different robots with multiple end effectors, as well as different technologies for mobile manipulation, vision, and HRI. The diversity of the tasks and the competitiveness of the challenge allowed us to template our philosophy and to delineate our path to innovation.