Robust Robotic Fleet Management for Warehouse Operations

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Scientific background:The demand for click-and-deliver e-commerce services for food and grocery has increased. This, in turn, has increased the demand for deploying robotic-fleets in warehouses. There are very commercial players in the field with a feasible commercial solution. In literature, researchers address either the multi-robot task allocation, ignoring the path planning or the multi-robot path planning, ignoring the task planning approaches. However, simultaneously addressing these can ensure efficient collaborations between the robots in sharing the workload of different orders and efficient collision-free multi-robot navigation. There is also a high demand for performance guarantees if robots fail during their operation or if they end up in congested situations causing delays in fulfilling their assigned tasks. This project will explore the development of robust robotic fleet management algorithms with performance guarantees for robustness while deploying in a warehouse.Research methodology:The student will investigate (i) clustering of tasks based on the subtasks (items in each order), (ii) a hybrid centralised-decentralised approach for allocation of clusters of pick and delivery, and replenishment tasks preferably using market-based approaches and (iii) associated collision-free and time and energy efficient multi-robot path planning (MRPP) using prioritised multi-robot path planning with time-windowed reservation tables. The MRPP component may also be addressed in a hybrid manner to give robustness guarantees and to ensure scalability to a large number of robots operating in large environments.Training:Forwarding the thoughts and vision from a single robot's perspective to those of a fleet of coordinated robots Understanding of mathematical optimisation problem formulation Working on physical robotic platforms Developing and working on simulated environments Programming and developing algorithms Understanding and incorporating industry partner's requirements into the research Academic writing and publishing Dissemination of research contributions to a wide range of audience