Intra-logistics with integrated automatic deployment: from one to multi-mobile robot systems

Pioneered by web giants like Amazon, and accelerated by an even increasing e-commerce demand, automated logistics solutions have been progressing at high speed in the last ten years. However, in 2015 less than 10% of companies operating warehouses in the USA had already upgraded to robotized storerooms. If technologies are mature, why does robotization rarely apply to current intra-logistics? This thesis fits into the EU's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program, under agreement no. 732737 (ILIAD), which pursues to overcome some remaining lacks in the state of the art that are currently limiting the transition. Starting from designing the autonomous navigation system of a specific low budget AGV, I tackled the problem of guaranteeing provable safe yet efficient coordination of heterogeneous fleets of non-holomic robots in mixed man-machine scenarios. In this vein, I extended a centralized priority-based approach (Pecora, 2018) to tackle with communication failures and liveness issues. Simulations and tests on real robots support the theoretical finding. Finally, I investigated the efficacy of NSB-IK approaches for managing multi-robots fleets. A unified formulation is proposed. Also, I tackle the problem of guaranteeing continuity of controls despite switching activation of tasks. The approach is validated formally and via simulations with fleets of holomic disc-shaped robots.