Abstract:

Today, thousands of robots are navigating autonomously in warehouses, transporting goods from one location to another. While numerous planning algorithms are developed to coordinate robots more efficiently and robustly, warehouse layouts remain largely unchanged – they still adhere to the traditional pattern designed for human workers rather than robots. In this talk, I will share our recent progress in exploring layout design and optimization to enhance large-scale multi-robot coordination. First, I will introduce a direct layout optimization method based on stochastic optimization. Then, I will discuss a method to optimize layout generators instead of layouts. Last, I will extend these ideas to virtual layout design, which does not require changes to the physical world that robots navigate and thus has the potential for applications beyond automated warehouses.