The Journal of Korea Robotics Society (로봇학회논문지)

Korea Robotics Society (한국로봇학회)
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Implementation of MAPF-based Fleet Management System

다중에이전트 경로탐색(MAPF) 기반의 실내배송로봇 군집제어 구현

  • Received : 2022.08.30
  • Accepted : 2022.10.24
  • Published : 2022.11.30
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Abstract

Multiple AMRs have been proved to be effective in improving warehouse productivity by eliminating workers' wasteful walking time. Although Multi-agent Path Finding (MAPF)-based solution is an optimal approach for this task, its deployment in practice is challenging mainly due to its imperfect plan-execution capabilities and insufficient computing resources for high-density environments. In this paper, we present a MAPF-based fleet management system architecture that robustly manages multiple robots by re-computing their paths whenever it is necessary. To achieve this, we defined four events that trigger our MAPF solver framework to generate new paths. These paths are then delivered to each AMR through ROS2 message topic. We also optimized a graph structure that effectively captures spatial information of the warehouse. By using this graph structure we can reduce computational burden while keeping its rescheduling functionality. With proposed MAPF-based fleet management system, we can control AMRs without collision or deadlock. We applied our fleet management system to the real logistics warehouse with 10 AMRs and observed that it works without a problem. We also present the usage statistic of adopting AMRs with proposed fleet management system to the warehouse. We show that it is useful over 25% of daily working time.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

This project was supported by Institute of Information & Communications Technology Planning & Evaluation (IITP) grant funded by the Korean government (No. 2020-0-00857)

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