Anna Mannucci

Örebro University | oru · Center for Applied Autonomous Sensor Systems (AASS)

Current intralogistics services require keeping up with e-commerce demands, reducing delivery times and waste, and increasing overall flexibility. As a consequence, the use of automated guided vehicles (AGVs) and, more recently, autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) for logistics operations is steadily increasing.

Robots operating with humans in highly dynamic environments need not only react to moving persons and objects but also to anticipate and adhere to patterns of motion of dynamic agents in their environment. Currently, robotic systems use information about dynamics locally, through tracking and predicting motion within their direct perceptual range....

This paper presents a robotics laboratory originated by the collaboration between the university and high school within the Italian school-work transition program. The educational objective of the proposed lab is twofold: 1) ease the transfer of robotic researchers’ expertise into useful means for the students’ learning; 2) teaching by practice the...

A standing challenge in current intralogistics is to reliably, effectively, yet safely coordinate large-scale, heterogeneous multi-robot fleets without posing constraints on the infrastructure or unrealistic assumptions on robots. A centralized approach, proposed by some of the authors in prior work, allows overcoming these limitations with medium-...

A standing challenge in multirobot systems is to realize safe and efficient motion planning and coordination methods that are capable of accounting for uncertainties and contingencies. The challenge is rendered harder by the fact that robots may be heterogeneous and that their plans may be posted asynchronously. Most existing approaches require con...

This paper presents a robotics laboratory originated by the collaboration between the university and high school within the Italian school-work transition program. The educational objective of the proposed lab is twofold: 1) ease the transfer of robotic researchers' expertise into useful means for the students' learning; 2) teaching by practice the...

We propose a loosely-coupled framework for integrated task assignment, motion planning, coordination and control of heterogeneous fleets of robots subject to non-cooperative tasks. The approach accounts for the important real-world requirement that tasks can be posted asynchronously. We exploit systematic search for optimal task assignment, where i...

Warehouse mobile robotics is nowadays entering the mass-production market. Increasing the number of mobile robots up to decades raises new challenges: current industrial practice relies on centralized fleet management, which might hinder efficacy in the case of large fleets. This paper proposes and discusses a partially and a fully distributed exte...

Multirobot fleets play an important role in industrial logistics, surveillance, and exploration applications. A wide literature exists on the topic, both resorting to reactive (i.e. collision avoidance) and to deliberative (i.e. motion planning) techniques. In this work, null space-based inverse kinematics (NSB-IK) methods are applied to the proble...

Warehouse logistics is a rapidly growing market for robots. However, one key procedure that has not received much attention is the unwrapping of pallets to prepare them for objects picking. In fact, to prevent the goods from falling and to protect them, pallets are normally wrapped in plastic when they enter the warehouse. Currently, unwrapping is...

Coordination is a core problem in multi-robot systems, since it is key to ensuring safety and efficiency. Both centralized and decentralized solutions have been proposed, however, most assume perfect communication. This article proposes a centralized method which removes this assumption, and is suitable for fleets of robots driven by generic second...

In this article a coordinated approach to 3D exploration of large uncluttered areas with a team of flying robots with constrained payload is proposed. Coordination is used as trump card for an effective exploration in feasible time and to overcome problems related to the limited computational power and autonomy of the robot platform. In particular,...