Automated warehousing using robotic forklifts

Patent metadata

Field	Value
Publication number	US-RE47108-E
Application number	US-201715439301-A
Country	US
Kind code	E1
Filing date	Feb 22, 2017
Priority date	Mar 15, 2013
Publication date	Oct 30, 2018
Grant date	Oct 30, 2018

Abstract

A system for automated inventory management and material handling removes the requirement to operate fully automatically or all-manual using conventional vertical storage and retrieval (S&R) machines. Inventory requests to place palletized material into storage at a specified lot location or retrieve palletized material from a specified lot are resolved into missions for autonomous fork trucks, equivalent mobile platforms, or manual fork truck drivers (and their equipment) that are autonomously or manually executed to effect the request. Automated trucks plan their own movements to execute the mission over the warehouse aisles or roadways sharing this space with manually driven trucks. Automated units drive to planned speed limits, manage their loads (stability control), stop, go, and merge at intersections according human driving rules, use on-board sensors to identify static and dynamic obstacles, and human traffic, and either avoid them or stop until potential collision risk is removed.

First claim

The invention claimed is:

1. A system for automated inventory management and material handling, comprising:
one or more automatically-driven robotic material handling vehicles, each including:
a) drive-by-wire operation apparatus with automated and manual controls,;
b) a location determining subsystem, including:

a relative position measurement device operative to generate a signal representitive of relative vehicle position,
an absolute position measurement device operative to generate a signal representitive of absolute vehicle position, and
a processor for receiving the signals from the measurement devices, the processor being further operative to perform an averaging function on the signals to generate a estimate of vehicle location based upon relative and absolute vehicle position;
c) a proximity obstacle detection and avoidance subsystem,; and
d) a subsystem to support automatic traversal from a pick-up location to one or more drop-off locations, and

an inventory systems controller, including:
a) database of inventory stored in a storage facility,
b) a maps database associated with the layout of the storage facility,
c) a database of the automatically-driven robotic material handling vehicles, and
d) an inventory request server that accepts inventory requests, selects an available vehicle, and sends the vehicle on a mission plan using the maps database to carry out the inventory request.

2. The system of claim 1 , including a robotic material handling vehicle operative to receive inventory requests to place palletized material into storage at a specified lot location, or retrieve palletized material from a specified lot location.

3. The system of claim 1 14, wherein the database of stored inventory associates lot and pallet identification with pallet location.

4. The system of claim 1 14, wherein the maps database includes waypoints, checkpoints, path segments, and area sections.

5. The system of claim 1 14, wherein the vehicles database includes vehicle mission plans, tracking data, and vehicle status.

6. The system of claim 1 , including automatically-driven robotic material handling vehicles vehicle with sensors and processing electronics enabling the vehicle to navigate through narrow doors or passages and security checkpoints.

7. The system of claim 1 , including an automatically-driven robotic material handling vehicles vehicle with modular, mission-specific sensors within a common location determination architecture.

8. The system of claim 1 , wherein one or more of the following sensor technologies are fused into a common location determination architecture:
GPS, IMU, magnetometer, differential odometry, RFID fiducials, and visual fiducials.

9. The system of claim 1 , including automatically-driven robotic material handling vehicles with sensors to read and interpret visual codes that encode location and other associated data as fiducials to determine indoor locations.

10. The system of claim 1 , including automatically-driven robotic material handling vehicles with sensors wherein the location determining subsystem includes a sensor to read and interpret RFIDs a computer-recognizable code or fiducial that encode encodes location and other associated data as fiducials or pallet identifiers to determine identification and to determine locations.

11. The system of claim 1 , including an automatically-driven robotic material handling vehicles vehicle in the form of an autonomous fork trucks truck.

12. The system of claim 1 , including an automatically-driven robotic material handling vehicles vehicle in the form of an autonomous mobile platforms platform.

13. The system of claim 1 , further including manually driven fork trucks or other material handling equipment an automatically-driven robotic material handling vehicle in communication with the an inventory systems controller to receive mission plans to carry out the inventory request.

14. The system of claim 1, further comprising:
an inventory systems controller, including: a) database of inventory stored in a storage facility; b) a maps database associated with the layout of the storage facility; c) a database of the automatically-driven robotic material handling vehicles; and d) an inventory request server that accepts inventory requests, selects an available vehicle, and sends the vehicle on a mission plan using the maps database to carry out the inventory request.

15. The system of claim 10, wherein the computer-recognizable code is an RFID tag or barcode.

16. The system of claim 1, wherein the relative position measurement device is an inertial measurement unit.

17. The system of claim 1, wherein the relative position measurement device is differential wheel encoder.

18. The system of claim 1, wherein the absolute position measurement device is a sensor operative to detect a fixed landmark or fiducial.

19. The system of claim 1, wherein the absolute position measurement device includes a global positioning satellite (GPS) receiver.

20. The system of claim 1, wherein the absolute position measurement device is a magnetometer.

Assignees

• Cybernet Systems Corp

Inventors

• Jacobus Charles J
• Beach Glenn J
• Rowe Steve

Classifications

• B66F9/063

  Automatically guided · CPC title

• G06Q10/087 Primary

  Inventory or stock management, e.g. order filling, procurement or balancing against orders · CPC title

• G05D1/024

  in combination with a laser (lasers per se H01S) · CPC title

• G05D1/0274 Primary

  using mapping information stored in a memory device (navigation using map-matching G01C21/30) · CPC title

• G05D2201/0216

  Physics · mapped topic