Abstract

It is evident that over the last years, the usage of robotics in warehouses has been rapidly increasing. The usage of robot vehicles in storage facilities has resulted in increased efficiency and improved productivity levels. The robots, however, are only as efficient as the algorithms that govern them. Many researchers have attempted to improve the efficiency of industrial robots by improving on the internal routing of a warehouse, or by finding the best locations for charging power stations. Because of the popularity of the problem, many research works can be found in the literature regarding warehouse routing. The majority of these algorithms found in the literature, however, are statically designed and cannot handle multi-robot situations, especially when robots have different characteristics. The proposed algorithm of this paper attempts to give the following solution to this issue: utilizing more than one robot simultaneously to allocate tasks and tailor the navigation path of each robot based on its characteristics, such as its speed, type and current location within the warehouse so as to minimize the task delivery timing. Moreover, the algorithm finds the optimal location for the placement of power stations. We evaluated the proposed methodology in a synthetic realistic environment and demonstrated that the algorithm is capable of finding an improved solution within a realistic time frame.

Highlights

  • We live in a society that is marked by the rapid development of sciences and technologies [1,2]

  • The research work presented in this paper is an extension of our previous conference paper [22] and is different from the aforementioned works in three main aspects: (1) we give a solution to the task allocation issue inside modern warehouses, where the environment is dynamically changing, meaning that the location of each robot changes; (2) the algorithm performs an in-depth task analysis, meaning that it calculates the task route as well as the energy cost; (3) in order to evaluate the performance and capabilities of the proposed methodology, we developed a synthetic environment benchmarking tool that is capable of calculating realistic warehouse environments

  • We used the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) socket in a predefined port, which has the ability to display the movements of the robots in real time

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Summary

Introduction

We live in a society that is marked by the rapid development of sciences and technologies [1,2]. Technological advances have always played a significant role and signaled major changes for humanity [3]. The advance of new technologies has been rapidly accelerating, resulting in the increased usage of robotics and embedded systems [4,5,6,7,8,9]. Warehouses and storage facilities are one application area in which robotics and embedded systems are prominent [11,12]. Warehouse and manufacturing environments have long been a potential arena for robotics and automation tasks to assist humans in producing better and faster results. Travel consumes a significant amount of time, making it a prime candidate for optimization

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