Coordinating hundreds of cooperative, autonomous vehicles in warehouses

Abstract

Occasionally, mature industries are turned upside down by innovations. The years of research on robotics and multiagent systems are coming together to provide just such a disruption to the material-handling industry. While autonomous guided vehicles (AGVs) have been used to move material within warehouses since the 1950s, they have been used primarily to transport very large, very heavy objects like rolls of uncut paper or engine blocks. The confluence of inexpensive wireless communications, computational power,