IROS 2018, Madrid, Spain

Robotics for logistics in warehouses and environments shared with humans

Full day Workshop, Friday October 5, 2018

 

The workshop was organized by the topic group on Robotics for Logistics and Transport of euRobotics AISBL and by following European Union’s H2020 projects:

• ILIAD – iliad-project.eu
• REFILLS – refills-project.eu
• RoPod – europa.eu/project/rcn/206247_en.html
• SafeLog – safelog-project.eu

with the support of other running H2020 projects addressing research and technological issues that are closely related to logistics: Co4Robots, SciRoc.

 

ORGANIZERS

Luigi Villani Università di Napoli Federico II, Italy This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.	Jesús Julián Alfonso De la Riva ITAINNOVA/Instituto Tecnológico de Aragón, Spain This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Martin Magnusson Örebro University, Sweden This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.	Erwin Prassler Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, Germany This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
David Puljiz Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

OBJECTIVES

The world of logistics and distribution is a strongly growing sector for suppliers of robot technologies and a field full of exciting challenges for robotics research. Robots today can perceive, recognize, pick and manipulate a wide variety of objects. They can navigate and move things in less and less structured environments. They can collaborate with human operators in shared workspaces, interacting safely with employees and customers. These advances in robotic technologies, together with their relatively low costs, make robotic solutions appealing not only for all the components of the logistics supply chain, including warehouses, distribution centers, sorting centers, last-mile delivery, but also for intra-logistic operations in retail stores, care facilities, and hospitals.

The European Union’s H2020 research and innovation program funded a number of projects related to robotics for logistics in warehouses and environments shared with humans. Four of them (ILIAD, REFILLS, RpPod, SafeLog), involving research institutions, logistic companies, robot manufacturers, end-users from different European countries, are committed to the workshop organization.

The project ILIAD: Intra-Logistics with Integrated Automatic Deployment for safe and scalable fleets in shared spaces (iliad-project.eu) aims at developing robotic solutions for intra-logistic services that can easily integrate with current warehouse facilities. The focus is on self-deploying fleets of heterogeneous robots, on-line self-optimizing fleet management, mobile manipulation, efficient and safe operation in an environment shared with humans.

The project REFILLS: Robotics Enabling Fully‐Integrated Logistics Lines for Supermarkets (www.refills-project.eu) aims at improving logistics in a supermarket thanks to mobile robotic systems in close and smart collaboration with humans, addressing the main in-store logistics processes for retail shops: shelf monitoring, store delivery and pre-sorting, smart shelf refilling.

The project RoPod: Ultra-flat, ultra-flexible, cost-effective robotic pods for handling legacy in logistics (cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/206247_en.html) aims at developing and implementing a disruptive concept for AGVs that lowers the existing barriers in logistics by offering automated and semi-automated indoor transportation of goods, without imposing disruptive changes in existing logistic solutions. Equal emphasis is put on cost-effective as well as on human-friendly automation of logistic tasks, making the solution suitable for environments like hospitals and care facilities.

The project SafeLog: Safe human-robot interaction in logistic applications for highly flexible warehouses (safelog-project.eu) proposes the conception and implementation of a Large-scale flexible warehouse system which enables a safe and efficient collaboration of human and robots in the same area and at the same time. Three main components are being developed to achieve this vision. The first is the development of a safety-certifiable safety vest that prevents robots from coming into the proximity of the human worker, thus preventing accidents. The second is a fast heterogeneous path planner that can quickly plan and re-plan routes with constraints for different types of agents (AGVs, humans, autonomous forklifts, etc.). Finally, an AR-based worker support system is developed for picking, maintenance, and navigation assistance.

Starting from the research and technological issues of the above projects reported by the protagonists, this workshop intends to share knowledge about technological opportunities and challenges regarding robotics for logistics. The aim is to bring together and confront the experience of researchers, end users, logistics and robotics companies working on novel approaches, through a mixture of talks from invited speakers, an interactive poster session and a round-table discussion.

 

PROGRAM

October 5, 2018, Room PARIS 1.L2

09:00-09:10 | Welcome and introduction

09:10-09:25 | ILIAD in a nutshell - Achim Lilienthal, Örebro University, Sweden

09:25-09:40 | SAFELOG in a nutshell - Björn Hein, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany

09:40-09:55 | REFILLS in a nutshell - Bruno Siciliano, Università di Napoli Federico II, Italy

09:55-10:10 | ROPOD in a nutshell - Erwin Prassler, Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, Germany

Part I - Human-robot collaboration in logistics

10:10-10:30 | Using 50 years of injury research for making human-friendly robots - Saeed Abdolshah, Technical University of Munich, Germany

10:30-11:00 | Interactive presentations highlights Towards accurate 3D person detection and localization from RGB-D in cluttered environments - Timm Linder, Bosch GmbH Corporate Research, Stuttgart, Germany Development of an industrial mobile cobot - Cyril Quennouelle, BA Systèmes, France Safe feature-based navigation for industrial AGVs - Dario Lodi Rizzini, University of Parma, Italy Autonomous warehouse navigation using 3D time-of-flight cameras - Erik Maehle, University of Luebeck, Germany  Flexible intralogistic processes through service robot system composition - Matthias Rollenhagen, University of Applied Sciences Ulm, Germany A system for picking and stowing in an on-line shopping warehouse - Angel P. del Pobil, Jaume I University, Castellón, Spain

11:00-11:50 | Coffee break & interactive session

11:50-12:10 | Safe and efficient collaborative fleets of autonomous vehicles in shared warehouses - Achim Lilienthal, Örebro University, Sweden

12:10-12:30 | Coordinated trajectory planning for automated warehouses - Miroslav Kulich, Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic

12:30-12:50 | Safety vest and human localization for human-robot collaboration - Ivan Marković, University of Zagreb, Croatia and Gaël Ecorchard, CVUT, Czech Republic

12:50-13:10 | Augmented reality and intention recognition in robotic warehouses - David Puljiz, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany

13:10-13:30 | Benchmarking and benchmarking competitions for robotics in warehouses and environments shared with humans - Gerhard Kraetzschmar, Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences, Germany

13:30-14:30 | Lunch break

Part II - Robotics applications in logistics

14:30-14:50 | Learning of perceptual models of retail products using photo-realistic simulations of supermarkets - Ferenc Bálint-Benczédi, Universität Bremen, Germany

14:50-15:10 | Leveraging simulation for instance segmentation in pick and place scenarios - Sebastian Höfer, Amazon Research, Germany

15:10-15:30 | Modularity and flexibility: the features that logistics robots must have - Francesco Ferro, PAL Robotics, Spain

15:30-15:50 | Tactile finger tip sensors for shelf replenishment in retail stores: Design, control, and application - Ciro Natale, Università della Campania Luigi Vanvitelli, Italy

15:50-16:20 | Interactive presentations highlights An efficient pipeline for pick-and-place between bins for warehouse automation - Kostas Bekris, Rutgers University, NJ, USA A depalletising system for heterogeneous and unstructured pallets - Vincenzo Lippiello, Università di Napoli Federico II, Italy The combined task allocation and path finding problem - Christian Henkel, Fraunhofer IPA, Stuttgart, Germany Towards an autonomous vision-based inventory drone - Jesús Pestana Puerta, Graz University of Technology, Austria Improving localisation accuracy using submaps in warehouses - Daniel Adolfsson, Örebro University, Sweden Fusing saliency maps with region proposals for class-agnostic object localisation - Hakan Karaoguz, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

16:20-17:10 | Coffee break & interactive session

17:10-17:30 | Semantic store maps: Knowledge representation and reasoning for large-scale retail environments - Georg Bartels, Universität Bremen, Germany

17:30-17:50 | Soft robotic solutions for warehouse applications: from bin picking to palletizing - Lucia Pallottino, Università di Pisa, Italy

17:50-18:10 | Composable world models for robotics in logistics - Herman Bruyninckx, KU Leuven, Belgium

18:10-18:30 |"Analysis mode!": Robot (remote) monitoring, inspection, and diagnosis as prerequisites for deploying robots to everyday environments - Alex Mitrevski, Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, Germany

18:30-18:50 | Simultaneous conflict-free task-assignment and path planning for multi-AGV systems - Cristian Secchi, Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Italy

18:50-19:00 | Wrap-up session and conclusion

 

PICTURES