M2 Internship - New Navigation Algorithms for Autonomous Mobile Robots in Intralogistics Operations

Offre mise à jour le 20/06/2023

The tremendous development of industry 4.0 concepts leads to a spread of Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) utilization in many intralogistics operations, like manufacturing, warehousing, etc. For many industrialists, AMRs appears as a flexible solution to handle the no-nonvalue added activities of material handling. The internship proposed considers work floors that requires the presence of both human operators and various material handling equipment technologies, like forklifts, trolleys, tugger trains, etc. These scenarios are representative of many industrial sectors, such as assembly, logistics hub, engineer-to-order manufacturing, etc.
Even if AMRs have made important progress in areas such as system setup, navigation and collision avoidance, progress remains to be made regarding the acceptability of AMRs’ motions among humans and mission predictability. The challenge is to design navigation strategies that account for the particulars of such environments, and that guarantee the quality of the human operators’ working conditions while reaching high industrial performance for the production system (throughput, on time delivery, etc.). To develop the new navigation algorithms, the proposal is to use a transdisciplinary approach including new navigation constraints coming from industrial ergonomics and sociology as well as from operations management theory.

Objectives
During this internship, the first step will be to analyze the state-of-the-art literature on AMR navigation in industrial setups in order to determine if and how the behavior and the expectations of the surrounding human operators are taken into account along with the overall objectives of the production system, like avoiding machine loss of supply, preventing overstock, etc.
The second step will be to identify the possibly missing navigation constraints using knowledge from ergonomics, sociology and operations management theory. Interviews of AMR users in industrial partner companies can be considered as well.
The third step will be to design a novel navigation strategy that takes into account the constraints previously identified.
The last step will be to demonstrate the performance of the navigation strategy proposed. A case study featuring AMRs dedicated to internal logistics in a testbed environment will be considered. Given the time frame of a Master project, experiments will be performed in simulation first. Experiments with actual AMRs could be carried out in a follow-up PhD.

Supervisors: Pierre DAVID & Thierry FRAICHARD
Labs involved: G-SCOP & INRIA
Internship location: INRIA Montbonnot (near Grenoble)
Keywords: material handling, mobile robot navigation, social & industrial constraints
Perks: monthly gratification, food & public transport subsidies
Duration: 5 to 6 months

Position to start in February/March 2023. To apply send cover letter, CV, transcript of your grades to thierry.fraichard@inria.fr