From Laboratory to Warehouse: Security Robots Meet the Real World

Abstract

The Mobile Detection Assessment and Response System robotic security program has successfully demonstrated simultaneous control of multiple robots navigating autonomously within an operational warehouse environment. This real-world warehouse installation required adapting a navigational paradigm designed for highly structured environments such as office corridors (with smooth walls and regularly spaced doorways) to a semistructured warehouse environment (with no exposed walls and within which odd-shaped objects unpredictably move about from day to day). A number of challenges, some expected and others unexpected, were encountered during the transfer of the system first to a beta-test/demonstration site and then to an operational warehouse. This paper examines these problems (and others previously encountered) in a historical context of the evolution of navigation and other needed technologies, and the transition of these technologies from the research lab to an operational warehouse environment. A key lesson is that system robustness can only be ensured by exhaustively exercising the system’s operational capabilities in a number of diverse environments. This approach helps to uncover latent system hardware deficiencies and software implementation errors not manifested in the initial system hardware or initial development environment, and to identify sensor modes or processing algorithms tuned too tightly to the specific characteristics of the initial development environment.