Autonomous Vehicles and Automated Warehousing Systems for Industry 4.0

The rapid development of new technologies that enabled the emergence of important development segments such as the Internet of Things, Cyber Physical Systems, Information and Communication Technologies, Enterprise Architecture, and Enterprise Integration, have led to completely new manufacturing paradigms, which is called under the common name – Industry 4.0. The constantly growing use of autonomous vehicles and associated logistics solutions is among the most influential factors that foster this novel intelligent production framework. This paper describes the results of the latest research activities of the Laboratory for Robotics and Intelligent Control Systems in the Industry 4.0 domain where the focus lies on the shop floor digitalization and advanced control concepts that enable the transfer of technology and delivery of high-scalable logistic solutions

Autonomous Vehicles and Automated Warehousing Systems for Industry 4.0

The rapid development of new technologies that enabled the emergence of important development segments such as the Internet of Things, Cyber Physical Systems, Information and Communication Technologies, Enterprise Architecture, and Enterprise Integration, have led to completely new manufacturing paradigms, which is called under the common name – Industry 4.0. The constantly growing use of autonomous vehicles and associated logistics solutions is among the most influential factors that foster this novel intelligent production framework. This paper describes the results of the latest research activities of the Laboratory for Robotics and Intelligent Control Systems in the Industry 4.0 domain where the focus lies on the shop floor digitalization and advanced control concepts that enable the transfer of technology and delivery of high-scalable logistic solutions

Smart and Intelligent Automation for Industry 4.0 using Millimeter-Wave and Deep Reinforcement Learning

Innovations in communication systems, compute hardware, and deep learning algorithms have led to the advancement of smart industry automation. Smart automation includes industrial sectors such as intelligent warehouse management, smart infrastructure for first responders, and smart monitoring systems. Automation aims to maximize efficiency, safety, and reliability. Autonomous forklifts can significantly increase productivity, reduce safety-related accidents, and improve operation speed to enhance the efficiency of a warehouse. Forklifts or robotic agents are required to perform different tasks such as position estimation, mapping, and dispatching. Each of the tasks involves different requirements and design constraints. Smart infrastructure for first responder applications requires robotic agents like Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to provide situation awareness surrounding an emergency. An immediate and efficient response to a safety-critical situation is crucial, as a better first response significantly impacts the safety and recovery of parties involved. But these UAVs lack the computational power required to run Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) that are used to provide the necessary intelligence. In this dissertation, we focus on two applications in smart industry automation. In the first part, we target smart warehouse automation for Intelligent Material Handling (IMH), where we design an accurate and robust Machine Learning (ML) based indoor localization system for robotic agents working in a warehouse. The localization system utilizes millimeter-wave (mmWave) wireless sensors to provide feature information in the form of a radio map which the ML model uses to learn indoor positioning. In the second part, we target smart infrastructure for first responders, where we present a computationally efficient adaptive exit strategy in multi-exit Deep Neural Networks using Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). The proposed adaptive exit strategy provides faster inference time and significantly reduces computations

Cost optimization in AGV applications

A otimização de custos em aplicações com veículos autónomos pode ser conseguida em diversas frentes. Nesta dissertação estudam-se e comparam-se soluções a três problemas: a interface entre instalador/operador do robô; a otimização de variáveis na solução de um problema de logística; e a escolha dos sensores afetos ao sistema de navegação

Task Assignment and Path Planning for Autonomous Mobile Robots in Stochastic Warehouse Systems

The material handling industry is in the middle of a transformation from manual operations to automation due to the rapid growth in e-commerce. Autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) are being widely implemented to replace manually operated forklifts in warehouse systems to fulfil large shipping demand, extend warehouse operating hours, and mitigate safety concerns. Two open questions in AMR management are task assignment and path planning. This dissertation addresses the task assignment and path planning (TAPP) problem for autonomous mobile robots (AMR) in a warehouse environment. The goals are to maximize system productivity by avoiding AMR traffic and reducing travel time. The first topic in this dissertation is the development of a discrete event simulation modeling framework that can be used to evaluate alternative traffic control rules, task assignment methods, and path planning algorithms. The second topic, Risk Interval Path Planning (RIPP), is an algorithm designed to avoid conflicts among AMRs considering uncertainties in robot motion. The third topic is a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) model that is developed to solve task assignment and path planning problems, simultaneously. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of these methods in stochastic warehouse systems

ViPR: Visual-Odometry-aided Pose Regression for 6DoF Camera Localization

Visual Odometry (VO) accumulates a positional drift in long-term robot navigation tasks. Although Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) improve VO in various aspects, VO still suffers from moving obstacles, discontinuous observation of features, and poor textures or visual information. While recent approaches estimate a 6DoF pose either directly from (a series of) images or by merging depth maps with optical flow (OF), research that combines absolute pose regression with OF is limited. We propose ViPR, a novel modular architecture for long-term 6DoF VO that leverages temporal information and synergies between absolute pose estimates (from PoseNet-like modules) and relative pose estimates (from FlowNet-based modules) by combining both through recurrent layers. Experiments on known datasets and on our own Industry dataset show that our modular design outperforms state of the art in long-term navigation tasks.Comment: Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR): Joint Workshop on Long-Term Visual Localization, Visual Odometry and Geometric and Learning-based SLAM 202

New hybrid control architecture for intelligent mobile robot navigation in a manufacturing environment

U radu je prikazana nova hibridna upravljačka arhitektura namenjena za eksploataciju i navigaciju inteligentnih mobilnih robota u tehnološkom okruženju. Arhitektura je bazirana na empirijskom upravljanju i implementaciji koncepta mašinskog učenja u vidu razvoja sistema veštačkih neuronskih mreža za potrebe generisanja inteligentnog ponašanja mobilnog robota. Za razliku od konvencionalne metodologije razvoja inteligentnih mobilnih robota, predložena arhitektura je razvijena na temeljima eksperimentalnog procesa i implementacije sistema veštačkih neuronskih mreža za potrebe generisanja inteligentnog ponašanja. Predložena metodologija razvoja i implementacije inteligentnih mobilnih robota treba da omogući nesmetanu i pouzdanu eksploataciju ali i robustnost u pogledu generisane upravljačke komande, kao odgovora robota na trenutno stanje tehnološkog okruženja.This paper presents a new hybrid control architecture for Intelligent Mobile Robot navigation based on implementation of Artificial Neural Networks for behavior generation. The architecture is founded on the use of Artificial Neural Networks for assemblage of fast reacting behaviors, obstacle detection and module for action selection based on environment classification. In contrast to standard formulation of robot behaviors, in proposed architecture there will be no explicit modeling of robot behaviors. Instead, the use of empirical data gathered in experimental process and Artificial Neural Networks should insure proper generation of particular behavior. In this way, the overall architectural response should be flexible and robust to failures, and consequently provide reliableness in exploitation. These issues are important especially if one takes under consideration that this particular architecture is being developed for mobile robot operating in manufacturing environment as a component of Intelligent Manufacturing System