Colloquium "Autonomous vehicle navigation in industrial environments: developments within the EC-SAFEMOBIL project"

Abstract:

The talk summarizes recent developments in the field of autonomous vehicle navigation in industrial environments. Autonomous vehicles have been used for automating material handling tasks for almost two decades. However, their operation is still dependent on artificial landmarks in the environment, predefined paths, and centralized coordination algorithms. This industrial state of the art is lagging behind recent scientific advances. For instance, markerless localization techniques and dynamic routing are considered to be solved problems within the mobile robotics community. However, a significant gap exists between having an algorithm published within the scientific community, and making it viable for the industry. Experimental validation publishable in academia typically involves experiments lasting up to several hours in laboratory conditions and positioning precision in the range of 10cm, with vehicles weighting up to 50kg. Industrial applications require sub-centimeter positioning precision for 24/7 uninterrupted operation in harsh industrial environments, for vehicles weighting several tons. The research presented in this talk attempts to bridge the gap between academic and industrial state of the art, by refining well-known autonomous navigation and localization techniques to improve their accuracy and robustness. The results are experimentally verified in an industrial environment in cooperation with Euroimpianti S.p.A., an Italian provider of warehousing automation solutions. The work has been conducted within the EC-SAFEMOBIL FP7 project.