Towards developing a cyber-physical warehouse system for automated order-picking for online shopping

Abstract

In recent years, Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) have been studied in various application areas. Since there are many robots that need to implement both physical and cyber sides, interact with each other and the environment, and the system has to cope with many faced difficulties, a warehouse system for automated order-picking for online shopping seems to be very suitable for being modeled and implemented as CPS. In this study, the planning and control of mobile robots in a store warehouse is defined from the perspectives of obstacle avoidance, collision detection, and solving the shortest path problem. Accordingly, a simulation environment is designed and a layered CPS development model is proposed. In the simulation environment, both object avoidance and collision detection algorithms are introduced and implemented, different shortest path-finding algorithms are adapted and implemented and their performances are evaluated.