Towards An Autonomous Warehouse Inventory Scheme

Frédéric Guinand (1) , Jean-François Brethé (2) , El Houssein Chouaib Harik (1) , François Guerin (2) , Hervé Pelvillain (3)

1 RI2C - LITIS - Equipe Réseaux d'interactions et Intelligence Collective
2 GREAH - Groupe de Recherche en Electrotechnique et Automatique du Havre
3 ULH - Université Le Havre Normandie

We present in this paper a novel warehouse inventory scheme. The main purpose of this work is to make the inventory process completly autonomous. To this end, an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) and an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) works together. The UGV is used as the carrying platform, and considered as a ground reference for indoor flight of the UAV. The UAV is used as the mobile scanner. The UGV navigates among rows of racks carrying the UAV. At each rack to be scanned, the UGV stops at the bottom, the UAV takes off and flies vertically scanning goods in that rack. Once at the top, the UGV moves to the next rack, and since the UAV takes the UGV as the ground reference, it will follow it, this results in placing the UAV at the top of the second rack, and scanning from top to bottom starts. the process is repeated until the row of racks is fully scanned, and the UAV lands on the UGV, and recharge its batteries while the UGV moves to the next row of racks. We present in this paper the proposed architecture, as well as the first experimental results of the proposed scheme

Domaines: Informatique [cs]; Robotique [cs.RO]; Automatique / Robotique

Frédéric Guinand, Jean-François Brethé, El Houssein Chouaib Harik, François Guerin, Hervé Pelvillain. Towards An Autonomous Warehouse Inventory Scheme. 2016 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence (SSCI), Dec 2016, Athens, Greece. pp.1-8, ⟨10.1109/SSCI.2016.7850056⟩. ⟨hal-02501373⟩