Autonomous Robots for Trailer Unloading

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In 2018, the retail industry in Canada had over $375 billion in sales, with over 11.5% of Canada's workforce contributing to this sector [Retail Sales of Canada]. Retail is the critical link in the supply chain that connects manufacturers to Canadian households. However, with increasing demand for retail goods, corporate distribution centres are overwhelmed and are looking to automate some of the tedious and time-consuming tasks such as the unloading of large trailers. The unloading of packaged items from trailers is a current bottleneck in the operations of many distribution centres as it requires workers to perform the physically arduous task of unloading, sorting, and palletizing packages manually over countless hours. The packages are often tightly packed and of assorted sizes and weights. This project seeks to design a robotic system for the autonomous unloading of mixed packages from large trailers at our partner industry distribution facilities. The open technical challenges that will be addressed range from the ability to identify and manipulate a variety of different packages ranging in size, shape and weight, to efficiently and reliably unloading them from a potentially cluttered arrangement onto their appropriate pallets. The proposed system will comprise a mobile-platform-mounted robotic manipulator arm with the necessary perception system to autonomously navigate within a trailer, and identify, retrieve and palletize packages in an optimized manner. The unique autonomous robotic system developed within this project will tangibly increase the efficiency and safety of the trailer unloading process, while creating a demand for skilled jobs.