Testbed for warehouse automation experiments using mobile AGVs and drones

In many industrial application domains, such as industry 4.0, logistics, process automation and personalized services, there is a need to operate in a more efficient and less time consuming way. Efficiency studies often involve simulations as a fundamental step to verify and analyze the performance of novel solutions. However, experimental research offers the possibility to validate innovative ideas on real systems and testbeds. To this end, we created a testbed for warehouse automation experiments with mobile AGVs and drones. This enables research on many different aspects such as indoor localization solutions, sensor fusion algorithms, video recognition, assets scanning, autonomous flight, path planning, drone charging, drone construction and materials.

I. Introduction

Warehousing systems are always pushing innovation towards automation to reduce operational time and costs, looking into advanced automation solutions for autonomous operation. Examples include the use of new item scanning techniques, virtual reality, autonomous guided vehicles, etc. Integrating these complex solutions requires testing and validation, which is not always straightforward in large operational and uncontrollable environments. To this end, we created a testbed for warehouse automation experiments that focuses on small-scale evaluations of mobile robotic units in warehouse environments, and supports hardware and software for setting up experiments using mobile AGVs and drones. In the next sections, we discuss the research potential of our testbed setup, discuss how it differs from existing solutions and discuss how the tools can be ported to other testbeds and real-life environments.