Warehouse automation by logistic robotic networks: a cyber-physical control approach

Abstract

In this paper we provide a tutorial on the background of warehouse automation using robotic networks and survey relevant work in the literature. We present a new cyber-physical control method that achieves safe, deadlock-free, efficient, and adaptive behavior of multiple robots serving the goods-to-man logistic operations. A central piece of this method is the incremental supervisory control design algorithm, which is computationally scalable with respect to the number of robots. Finally, we provide a case study on 30 robots with changing conditions to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.