Failure-Handling Strategies for Mobile Robots in Automated Warehouses

Abstract

Automated warehouses operated by a fleet of robots not only offer great flexibility, as fleet size can be adjusted easily to throughput requirements, they also provide higher redundancy compared to common solutions for automated storage and retrieval systems. In case a single robot fails, the remaining fleet of robots is able to continue working within the system, so that throughput is only slightly affected. However, adequate strategies are required for this scenario. In this contribution, we present four different approaches to cope with robot downtimes, which are based on the routing of the robots. These strategies are compared by performing a simulation study in which a robotic mobile fulfilment system is considered.