Research on Multi-robot Material Picking and Autonomous Path Planning System in Industrial Environment

Industrial 4.0 has been proposed in 2014 and has received many achievements so far under the development of robotics and artificial intelligence. Among all of the research projects on smart factory, transfer robots are one of the most common applications for robotics in industrial field. To improve the navigation accuracy when locating products as well as complete more tasks such as picking materials, multi-robot path planning algorithms are necessary to combine with manipulators like mechanical arms. This work is focused on designing a transfer robot and a mechanical arm for industrial environment. Meanwhile, a modified A* algorithm named HCA algorithm is implemented into the multi-robot transfer system with PID controlled mechanical arm. The system can be used to finish transfer missions in large-scale warehouses or narrow industries. To further develop this system, continuous actions should be used instead of discrete ones. Moreover, computer vision methods can be added to the mechanical arm to increase the grasping accuracy and flexibility.