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Flexible Transportation in Warehouses

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Automation in Warehouse Development

Abstract

In recent years, autonomous mobile robots (AMR) have emerged as a means of transportation system in warehouses. The complexity of the transport tasks requires efficient high-level control, i.e. planning and scheduling of the tasks as well as low-level motion control of the robots. Hence, an efficient coordination between robots is needed to achieve flexibility, robustness and scalability of the transportation system. In this chapter, we present a methodology to achieve coordination in different control layers, namely high-level and low-level coordination. We investigate how the coordination strategies perform in an automated warehouse. We use simulation results to analyse the system performance. We take into account typical performance indicators for a warehouse, such as time to accomplish the transportation tasks and total cost of the system. In addition to the simulation results, we conduct experiments in a small-scale representation of the warehouse.

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Correspondence to Sisdarmanto Adinandra .

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© 2012 Springer-Verlag London Limited

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Adinandra, S., Caarls, J., Kostić, D., Verriet, J., Nijmeijer, H. (2012). Flexible Transportation in Warehouses. In: Hamberg, R., Verriet, J. (eds) Automation in Warehouse Development. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-85729-968-0_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-85729-968-0_14

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  • Print ISBN: 978-0-85729-967-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-0-85729-968-0

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