A ros tool for optimal routing in intralogistics

Abstract

Robot Operating System (ROS) is a meta-operating system with a collection of sophisticated tools that can be used for enabling the scheduling and planning of mobile robots at industrial environments. Highly skilled IT professionals are handling intralogistics activities by programming the robots’ behaviour at the facility layout, both at simulation and real-world environments. The customization of the system by non-experts is not a trivial task. We propose an efficient and user friendly ROS tool as an interface for providing hot-spots at the facility layout where the loading and unloading activities take place. The user input is stored and visualized while an Ant Colony optimization algorithm determines the shortest path for navigating at the facility layout while passing through all the sections of interest. The final output is visualized at the simulation environment while in the meantime the real world robot follows the proposed path at the facility. Our pilot case study uses the Turtlebot3 Waffle mobile robot at a warehouse facility layout and the results indicate that the proposed tool could be utilized by non-experts for efficiently customizing the mobile robot’s path in real-world conditions.