The Next Step in Robot Commissioning: Autonomous Picking and Palletizing

So far, autonomous order picking (commissioning) systems have not been able to meet the stringent demands regarding speed, safety, and accuracy of real-world warehouse automation, resulting in reliance on human workers. In this letter, we target the next step in autonomous robot commissioning: automatizing the currently manual order picking procedure. To this end, we investigate the use case of autonomous picking and palletizing with a dedicated research platform and discuss lessons learned during testing in simplified warehouse settings. The main theoretical contribution is a novel grasp representation scheme which allows for redundancy in the gripper pose placement. This redundancy is exploited by a local, prioritized kinematic controller which generates reactive manipulator motions on-the-fly. We validated our grasping approach by means of a large set of experiments, which yielded an average grasp acquisition time of 23.5 s at a success rate of 94.7%. Our system is able to autonomously carry out simple order picking tasks in a human-safe manner, and as such serves as an initial step toward future commercial-scale in-house logistics automation solutions.