Storage Robot Navigation by Rack Counting for Item Location
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Solution Overview
Problem
Inventory management in storage sites is labor-intensive and inefficient due to misplaced items occupying space, requiring manual relocation and tracking, which wastes time and resources.
Innovation Solution
A robot equipped with an image sensor and processors that navigates through a storage site by recognizing regularly shaped structures, such as racks, to identify target locations by counting rows and columns, enabling autonomous inventory management and navigation.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If manual inventory management is used, then personnel can locate and track items, but time and resources are wasted due to misplaced items occupying space
Solution Approach 1:
The robot autonomously navigates the storage site, locates items, and identifies misplaced objects without human intervention. It uses image sensors to capture images, processes them to determine its location by counting structures, and automatically generates reports about misplaced items, enabling the system to manage itself
Solution Approach 2:
The patent replaces manual mechanical search and tracking with an automated robotic system equipped with image sensors and computer vision algorithms. The robot uses optical fields (cameras) and computational processing to detect and locate items, substituting human visual inspection and physical tracking with automated sensing and data processing
2Measurement precision
If automated robot navigation is implemented, then navigation speed and accuracy improve, but the system becomes more complex
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces regularly shaped structures (racks, shelves, dividers) as intermediary reference objects that simplify navigation. The robot counts these standardized structures to determine its location, using them as mediators between the robot's sensors and the complex storage site layout, thereby improving accuracy without proportionally increasing system complexity
Solution Approach 2:
The system changes the parameter of location representation from continuous coordinates to discrete counts of passed structures. Instead of tracking precise positional data, the robot counts integer numbers of racks and shelves, simplifying the navigation state space and reducing computational complexity while maintaining sufficient accuracy for inventory management tasks
Data Source
AI summary
A robot includes an image sensor that captures the environment of a storage site. The robot visually recognizes regularly shaped structures to navigate through the storage site using various object detection and image segmentation techniques. In response to receiving a target location in the storage site, the robot moves to the target location along a path. The robot receives the images as the robot moves along the path. The robot analyzes the images captured by the image sensor to determine the current location of the robot in the path by tracking a number of regularly shaped structures in the storage site passed by the robot. The regularly shaped structures may be racks, horizontal bars of the racks, and vertical bars of the racks. The robot can identify the target location by counting the number of rows and columns that the robot has passed.