Towards automated order picking robots for warehouses and retail

Abstract

Order picking is one of the most expensive tasks in warehouses nowadays and at the same time one of the hardest to automate. Technical progress in automation technologies however allowed for first robotic products on fully automated picking in certain applications. This paper presents a mobile order picking robot for retail store or warehouse order fulfillment on typical packaged retail store items. This task is especially challenging due to the variety of items which need to be recognized and manipulated by the robot. Besides providing a comprehensive system overview the paper discusses the chosen techniques for textured object detection and manipulation in greater detail. The paper concludes with a general evaluation of the complete system and elaborates various potential avenues of further improvement.