Cooperative cloud robotics architecture for the coordination of multi-AGV systems in industrial warehouses

Cardarelli, Elena; Digani, Valerio; Sabattini, Lorenzo; Secchi, Cristian; Fantuzzi, Cesare

doi:10.1016/j.mechatronics.2017.04.005

Cited by 94 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…This allows for real-time status input from each AGV unit that offers an opportunity to improve accuracy and time efficiency in logistics scheduling and inventory management tasks. Based on [13], a cloud robotics architecture that provides multiple functionalities to enable enhanced collaboration of AGV groups used in industrial logistics is presented. According to this architecture, a global live view of the environment is established, containing information about all entities in the industrial setting, which is then used to improve the local sensing capabilities of AGVs, thereby the efficiency and flexibility of AGV motion coordination.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cloud and IoT Applications in Material Handling Automation and Intralogistics

Ponis

Efthymiou

2020

Logistics

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During the last decade, digitalization has borne tremendous changes on the way we live and do business. Industry 4.0, the new industrial revolution, is merging the physical, digital and virtual worlds through emerging technologies that collide with each other and create a distinctive paradigm shift. Even though the topic of Industry 4.0, has attracted significant attention during the past few years, literature in this subject area is still limited. The main objective of this paper is to study the current state of the art and identify major trends and research shortcomings. To that end, the authors conducted a methodological literature review based primarily on the SCOPUS bibliographic database. The review returned 49 relative papers dealing with the paper’s subject area. Through a thorough study of the selected papers, four dominant literature categories were recognized and discussed in detail. According to the literature reviewed, it is evident that massive changes are underway for warehouses and intralogistics facilities. Still, despite the intense discussion and appeal of the subject, one of the most important challenges in the scientific area under study, as the literature highlights, is the absence of a matching, to its significance, number of real-life applications. To that end, this paper provides a detailed description of a Cloud-based IoT application drawn from a Distribution Center (DC) that supplies retail home furnishing and sporting goods products to stores in Greece and the Balkan region, with the objective to showcase the feasibility of such an investment, highlight its potential and provide motivation to practitioners to evaluate and proceed in similar technological investments.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cloud and IoT Applications in Material Handling Automation and Intralogistics

Ponis

Efthymiou

2020

Logistics

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“…In practice, the use of a fleet of AGVs requires the integration of networked collaborative interfaces to support the autonomous operation of AGVs. As shown in [7], a centralized cloud service acting as a control center can bring benefits on efficiency and flexibility of the AGV motion coordination in a warehouse environment. The cloud denomination in this work is based on a private pool of computational resources accessible by a Wi-Fi network with average latency values of 43 milliseconds.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing Long Distance Communication Alternatives for the Remote Control of AGVs

Bejarano

Pääkkönen

Blech

et al. 2020

2020 25th IEEE International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation (ETFA)

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Remote monitoring and control of factory equipment promises a more streamlined and therefore less expensive system operation and maintenance. The geographical distance between a factory and its control center, however, may influence the Quality of Service parameters of the network connections which might stymie the overall control process. To get a better understanding of these potential issues and their impact, we conducted a series of measurements over varying distances for the remote control, operation and simulation of Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) that are often used in modern factory environments. To achieve these tests, we defined three communication patterns reflecting local and remote connections as well as the usage of cloud-based services. Applying these patterns, we connected the Factory of the Future at the Aalto University in Finland with the VxLab at the RMIT University in Australia and the Microsoft Azure cloud in the Netherlands. This allowed us to measure important Quality of Service networking parameters for the communication over short, medium, and very long distances. In this paper, we present first empirical results and discuss their impact on the remote control of AGVs.

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“…These emitters will act as anchors for the UD localization. Let x ∈ R 3 and u ∈ R 3 be the unknown UD position and orientation vector, 1 LED array with multiple emitters will be widely adopted in visible light communications for high-rate data transmission [36], [37], [38], [40]. Hence, LED array will be a common practice and can be easily achieved in VLP.…”

Section: A System Setupmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Visible light-based positioning (VLP) is envisioned to be an important technique to improve the performance of indoor localization, with the widespread use of light emitting diodes (LEDs) for illumination. The position and orientation angle of user detector (UD) are critical knowledge for some location-based services such as robotic navigation towards autonomous parcel sorting [1], [2] and automatic parking [3]. Hence, VLP has attracted increasing attentions in industry and academia [4].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Performance Gain of Harnessing Non-Line-of-Sight Propagation for Visible Light-Based Positioning

Zhou

Zhuang

Cao

2020

IEEE Trans. Wireless Commun.

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Visible light signals undergo non-line-of-sight (NLOS) propagation, and the NLOS links are usually treated as disturbance sources in conventional visible light-based positioning (VLP) methods to simplify signal processing. However, the impact of NLOS propagation on the VLP performance is not fully understood. In this paper, we shall reveal the performance limits of VLP systems under diffuse scattering. First, the closed-form Cramer-Raw lower bounds (CRLBs) on the estimate errors of user detector (UD) location and orientation, respectively, are derived to shed light on the VLP performance limits. Second, the information contribution of NLOS links is quantified to gain insights into the effect of NLOS propagation on the VLP performance. It is shown that VLP can gain additional UD location information from NLOS links via leveraging the NLOS propagation knowledge. In other words, the NLOS channel can be exploited to improve the VLP performance, in addition to the line-of-sight (LOS) channel.

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Cooperative cloud robotics architecture for the coordination of multi-AGV systems in industrial warehouses

Cited by 94 publications

References 17 publications

Cloud and IoT Applications in Material Handling Automation and Intralogistics

Cloud and IoT Applications in Material Handling Automation and Intralogistics

Assessing Long Distance Communication Alternatives for the Remote Control of AGVs

On the Performance Gain of Harnessing Non-Line-of-Sight Propagation for Visible Light-Based Positioning

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