This book illustrates the applications of mobile robot systems in warehouse operations with an integrated decision framework for their selection and application. Mobile robot systems are an automation solution in warehouses that make order fulfillment agile, flexible and scalable to cope with the increasing volume and complexity of customer orders. Compared with manual operations, they combine higher productivity and throughput with lower operating costs. As the practical use of mobile robot systems is increasing, decision-makers are confronted with a plethora of decisions. Still, research is lagging in providing the needed academic insights and managerial guidance. The lack of a structured decision framework tailored for mobile robot system applications in warehouses increases the probability of problems when choosing automation systems. This book demonstrates the characteristics of mobile robot systems which reinforce warehouse managers in identifying, evaluating and choosing candidate systems through multiple criteria. Furthermore, the managerial decision framework covering decisions at strategic, tactical and operational levels in detail helps decision-makers to implement a mobile robot solution step-by-step. This book puts special emphasis on change management and operational control of mobile robots using path planning and task allocation algorithms. The book also introduces focus areas that require particular attention to aid the efficiency and practical application of these systems, such as facility layout planning, robot fleet sizing, and human-robot interaction. It will be essential reading for academics and students working on digital warehousing and logistics, as well as practitioners in warehouses looking to make informed decisions.

The warehouses of the future will come in a variety of forms, but with a few common ingredients. Firstly, human operational handling of items in warehouses is increasingly being replaced by automated item handling. Extended warehouse automation counteracts the scarcity of human operators and supports the quality of picking processes. Secondly, the development of models to simulate and analyse warehouse designs and their components facilitates the challenging task of developing warehouses that take into account each customer’s individual requirements and logistic processes. Automation in Warehouse Development addresses both types of automation from the innovative perspective of applied science. In particular, it describes the outcomes of the Falcon project, a joint endeavour by a consortium of industrial and academic partners. The results include a model-based approach to automate warehouse control design, analysis models for warehouse design, concepts for robotic item handling and computer vision, and autonomous transport in warehouses. Automation in Warehouse Development is targeted at both academic researchers and industrial practitioners. It provides state-of-the art research on warehouse automation and model-based warehouse design. These topics have been addressed from a systems engineering perspective by researchers from different disciplines including software, control, and mechanical engineering, with a clear focus on the industrial applications of their research.

Interest in control of climbing and walking robots has remarkably increased over the years. Novel solutions of complex mechanical systems such as climbing, walking, flying and running robots with different kinds of locomotion and the technologies that support them and their applications are the evidence of significant progress in the area of robotics. Supporting technologies include the means by which robots use to sense, model, and navigate through their environments and, of course, actuation and control technologies. Human interaction including exoskeletons, prostheses and orthoses, as well as service robots, are increasingly active important pertinent areas of research. In addition, legged machines and tracked platforms with software architecture seem to be currently the research idea of most interest to the robotics community.

The second edition of a comprehensive introduction to all aspects of mobile robotics, from algorithms to mechanisms. Mobile robots range from the Mars Pathfinder mission's teleoperated Sojourner to the cleaning robots in the Paris Metro. This text offers students and other interested readers an introduction to the fundamentals of mobile robotics, spanning the mechanical, motor, sensory, perceptual, and cognitive layers the field comprises. The text focuses on mobility itself, offering an overview of the mechanisms that allow a mobile robot to move through a real world environment to perform its tasks, including locomotion, sensing, localization, and motion planning. It synthesizes material from such fields as kinematics, control theory, signal analysis, computer vision, information theory, artificial intelligence, and probability theory. The book presents the techniques and technology that enable mobility in a series of interacting modules. Each chapter treats a different aspect of mobility, as the book moves from low-level to high-level details. It covers all aspects of mobile robotics, including software and hardware design considerations, related technologies, and algorithmic techniques. This second edition has been revised and updated throughout, with 130 pages of new material on such topics as locomotion, perception, localization, and planning and navigation. Problem sets have been added at the end of each chapter. Bringing together all aspects of mobile robotics into one volume, Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots can serve as a textbook or a working tool for beginning practitioners. Curriculum developed by Dr. Robert King, Colorado School of Mines, and Dr. James Conrad, University of North Carolina-Charlotte, to accompany the National Instruments LabVIEW Robotics Starter Kit, are available. Included are 13 (6 by Dr. King and 7 by Dr. Conrad) laboratory exercises for using the LabVIEW Robotics Starter Kit to teach mobile robotics concepts.

Wheeled Mobile Robotics: From Fundamentals Towards Autonomous Systemscovers the main topics from the wide area of mobile robotics, explaining all applied theory and application. The book gives the reader a good foundation, enabling them to continue to more advanced topics. Several examples are included for better understanding, many of them accompanied by short MATLAB® script code making it easy to reuse in practical work. The book includes several examples of discussed methods and projects for wheeled mobile robots and some advanced methods for their control and localization. It is an ideal resource for those seeking an understanding of robotics, mechanics, and control, and for engineers and researchers in industrial and other specialized research institutions in the field of wheeled mobile robotics. Beginners with basic math knowledge will benefit from the examples, and engineers with an understanding of basic system theory and control will find it easy to follow the more demanding fundamental parts and advanced methods explained. - Offers comprehensive coverage of the essentials of the field that are suitable for both academics and practitioners - Includes several examples of the application of algorithms in simulations and real laboratory projects - Presents foundation in mobile robotics theory before continuing with more advanced topics - Self-sufficient to beginner readers, covering all important topics in the mobile robotics field - Contains specific topics on modeling, control, sensing, path planning, localization, design architectures, and multi-agent systems

This book presents the proceedings of the 11th Scientific Conference “Intelligent systems for industrial automation,” WCIS-2020, held in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, on November 26–28, 2020. It includes contributions from diverse areas of intelligent industrial systems design as hybrid control systems, intelligent information systems, decision making under imperfect information and others. The topics of the papers include intelligent control systems, pattern recognition, Industry 4.0, information security, neural computing, fuzzy and evolutionary computation, decision making and support systems, modeling of chemical technological processes and others.

This book is a compilation of advanced research and applications on robotic item picking and warehouse automation for e-commerce applications. The works in this book are based on results that came out of the Amazon Robotics Challenge from 2015-2017, which focused on fully automated item picking in a warehouse setting, a topic that has been assumed too complicated to solve or has been reduced to a more tractable form of bin picking or single-item table top picking. The book’s contributions reveal some of the top solutions presented from the 50 participant teams. Each solution works to address the time-constraint, accuracy, complexity, and other difficulties that come with warehouse item picking. The book covers topics such as grasping and gripper design, vision and other forms of sensing, actuation and robot design, motion planning, optimization, machine learning and artificial intelligence, software engineering, and system integration, among others. Through this book, the authors describe how robot systems are built from the ground up to do a specific task, in this case, item picking in a warehouse setting. The compiled works come from the best robotics research institutions and companies globally.

The New York Times-bestselling guide to how automation is changing the economy, undermining work, and reshaping our lives Winner of Best Business Book of the Year awards from the Financial Times and from Forbes "Lucid, comprehensive, and unafraid . . . ;an indispensable contribution to a long-running argument." -- Los Angeles Times What are the jobs of the future? How many will there be? And who will have them? As technology continues to accelerate and machines begin taking care of themselves, fewer people will be necessary. Artificial intelligence is already well on its way to making "good jobs" obsolete: many paralegals, journalists, office workers, and even computer programmers are poised to be replaced by robots and smart software. As progress continues, blue and white collar jobs alike will evaporate, squeezing working -- and middle-class families ever further. At the same time, households are under assault from exploding costs, especially from the two major industries-education and health care-that, so far, have not been transformed by information technology. The result could well be massive unemployment and inequality as well as the implosion of the consumer economy itself. The past solutions to technological disruption, especially more training and education, aren't going to work. We must decide, now, whether the future will see broad-based prosperity or catastrophic levels of inequality and economic insecurity. Rise of the Robots is essential reading to understand what accelerating technology means for our economic prospects-not to mention those of our children-as well as for society as a whole.

Through expanded intelligence, the use of robotics has fundamentally transformed the business industry. Providing successful techniques in robotic design allows for increased autonomous mobility, which leads to a greater productivity and production level. Rapid Automation: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications provides innovative insights into the state-of-the-art technologies in the design and development of robotics and their real-world applications in business processes. Highlighting a range of topics such as workflow automation tools, human-computer interaction, and swarm robotics, this multi-volume book is ideally designed for computer engineers, business managers, robotic developers, business and IT professionals, academicians, and researchers.