RBE Capstone Presentation: Ravi Teja Alapati, Chaithanya Krishna Bodduluri, Harshavardhan Dammalapati | Warehouse Automation In the Dark

RBE Capstone  Presentation

Ravi Teja Alapati, Chaithanya Krishna Bodduluri, Harshavardhan Dammalapati

Warehouse Automation In the Dark

Friday, December 16th, 2022

3:00 PM

Kaven Hall  116.

Abstract: An autonomous navigation system for mobile robots can be used for multiple purposes like delivery, cleaning, surveillance, and so on in industrial areas, storage warehouses, etc. The existing end-to-end navigation solutions are mainly based on cameras where processing 3D data requires large memory and computation costs. Also, the cost of these sampling-based methods makes it very challenging to estimate the model’s uncertainty. Apart from these limitations, the warehouses would need to be illuminated all the time for the visual cameras to capture the data. To conserve the electrical energy used for lighting the warehouses, attention must be given to energy usage in the commercial sector. According to our calculations, a company with about 10 warehouses of an average size of 65000 sqft. each would spend nearly $4 million annually just for illumination. We propose fully automated dark or lights-out warehouses with multiple mobile robots that can function without any human assistance. We intend to perceive the environment with a 32-line LiDAR installed on top of the mobile robot. The proposed system is composed of two components: LiDAR-based mapping and localization module with obstacle detection and path planning with trajectory tracking module.