Implementation of Augmented Reality in Autonomous Warehouses: Challenges and Opportunities
This addresses the problem of human intervention needs in automated warehouses for workers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing AR and robotics technologies.
The paper tackles the challenge of human-robot interaction in autonomous warehouses by developing an augmented reality (AR) system for navigation, picking, and system interactions, with results including implemented modalities and planned future work.
Autonomous warehouses with mobile, rack-carrying robots are starting to become commonplace, with systems such as Amazon's Kiva and Swisslog's CarryPick already implemented in functional warehouses. Such warehouses however still require human intervention for object picking and maintenance. In the European project SafeLog we are developing a safety-vest, used for safety-critical ranging and stopping of mobile robots, an improved planner that can handle large fleets of heterogeneous agents as well as an AR interaction system to navigate and support human workers in such automated environments. Here we present the AR interaction modalities, namely navigation, pick-by-AR and general system interactions that were developed at the moment of writing, as well as the overall system concept and planned future work.