Object Detection in Picking - Handling variety of a warehouses articles

Ulm University

Presentation at the Hamburg International Conference of Logistics 2022, Mathias Rieder & Marius Breitmayer, Hamburg, Germany, 23.09.2022, 11 am

The automation of picking is still a challenge as a high amount of flexibility is needed to handle different articles according to their requirements. Enabling robot picking in a dynamic warehouse environment consequently requires a sophisticated object detection system capable of handling a multitude of different articles.

Testing the applicability of object detection approaches for logistics research started with few objects producing promising results. In the context of warehouse environments, the applicability of such approaches to thousands of different articles is still doubted. Using different approaches in parallel may enable handling a plethora of different articles as well as the maintenance of object detection approach in case of changes to articles or assortments occur.

The suitability of existing object detection algorithms originates from research on automation of established processes in existing warehouses. A process model was already introduced enabling the transformation of laboratory trained CNNs to industrial warehouses. Experiments with CNNs according to this approach are published now.