Speaker: René (M.) B.M. de Koster
The new generation of warehouses will be fully robotized. However, in the nearby future, robots will gradually find their way into the operations and will have to work in close collaboration with manual workers. In my talk, I will discuss two types of cobotic order picking systems, where robots and order pickers work together to fill customer orders: drive-on cobots and walk-along cobots. I will discuss empirical, experiment-based work on the impact on pick performance of robots leading versus robots following the pickers, and analytical modelling research on control strategies and collaboration strategies. Our results show that, with proper deployment, cobots may lead to a substantial increase in picking performance.
