Programming And Simulation Of Multi-Robot Warehousing Operation

In recent years, the development of logistics industry put forward the increasingly higher requirements for warehouse automation and operational capacity. This allows autonomous robot team which simultaneously schedule task plays an increasingly important role. At present, most robot team of logistics and warehousing adopt the centralized scheduling, and robot operation mode is single. But with a surge in the logistics business, storage environment is constantly changing. Fixed trajectory of robot has been unable to meet the needs of the change, so the robot team needs more flexibility and autonomy. Focusing on the problem, this paper developed a multi-robot picking simulation system.First, assigning picking tasks for multiple autonomous mobile robots are essential in the warehouse. This paper adopts the method which combining tasks density and dynamic contract net that based on market mechanisms to allocation task. The method enables task assignment with better real-time and effectiveness, and improves the overall efficiency of the system.Secondly, another priority issue for Multi-robot system is multi-robot path planning. This paper uses the traditional A* algorithm to solve this problem. On the other hand, this paper uses the grid method to model environmental, and finally obtained a collision-free path from a starting point to the target point.In addition, multi-robot may collide with other robots in the process of performing tasks. In this paper, the avoidance strategy based on a set of rules of conduct is adopted to solve this problem. Different from the traditional central coordinating, this method gets the next step of current robot according to the current state of the robot itself and other local sensing robots’ states. At the same time, the method reduces the computational cost that brought by the central coordination. Thus the robots can avoid obstacles in time and faster to complete the picking task.Finally, the MFC simulation result shows the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed scheme. In the long term, this scheme has possibility to provide a viable solution for future implementations of multi-robot warehousing practical application..