ILIAD, the robotic solution to intaligistic challenges
Through automation and roboti automation, ILIAD enables the innovation of intralogistics in the food distribution sector
Today, intralogistic services have to respond quickly to changing market needs, unforeseeable trends and shorter product life cycles. These drivers pose new demands on intralogistic systems to be highly flexible, rock-solid reliable, self-optimizing, quickly deployable and safe yet efficient in environments shared with humans. Current robotic solutions need purpose-built warehouses, and are unsuitable for bulky or perishable goods. In such a context, ILIAD changes the game with the revolution and automation of food distribution intralogistics, a sector whose distribution challenges are particularly pressing.ILIAD, the project for deployment automation and fleet optimization
Name of project:
ILIAD – Intra-Logistics with Integrated Automatic Deployment
Target markets:
Intralogistics, Food distribution
Funding:
European Union (Horizon 2020)
OUR SOLUTION
To guarantee a technological optimization that brings additional strategic value to the entirety of intralogistics, ILIAD’s robotic solutions span across four areas:
- FLEET MANAGEMENT: integrated task allocation, motion planning and coordination, continuously revise w.r.t. changing requirements;
- EFFORTLESS DEPLOYMENT AND LONG-TERM OPERATIONS:
automatically build structural & semantic maps, automatically verify map and location quality, life-long automatic calibration of sensors, integrate maps of different modalities; - MANIPULATION: novel end effectors for flexible manipulation, planning for picking and palletizing of heterogeneous goods, perception for segmenting transparent wrapping and tightly stacked objects.
- SAFE AND HUMAN-AWARE OPERATION: study of human safety in shared environments, injury biomechanics connected to safety control and planning, safety recommendations for certifying learning systems that work alongside humans, reliable detection & analysis of people (with full body and head orientation), recognition of human intentions, socially normative robotic motion, visual communication of the robot’s intentions.
These technological featuress are easily implementable in pre-existing intralogistics structures with a series of specific technological targets:
- Self-deploying fleets of heterogeneous robots in multiple-actor systems;
- Life-long self-optimization;
- Manipulation from a mobile platform;
- Efficient and safe operations in environments shared with humans;
- Efficient fleet management with formal guarantees.
ADVANTAGES
Scientifically, ILIAD pursues ambitious goals for complex cognitive systems in human environments beyond a specific use-case. Its technological solutions, employed throughout the whole intralogistic optimization process are beneficial in multiple ways:
- OVERCOMING THE TECHNOLOGY STATE OF THE ART: the development of the solution generated an intrisic advancement in the state of the art of several technological themes, among which:
a. Tracking and analyzing humans;
b. Quantifying map quality and predicting future states depending on activity patterns inferred from long-term observations;
c. Planning socially normative movements using learned human models;
d. Integrating task allocation, coordination and motion planning for heterogeneous robot fleets; - SAFER ENVIRONMENTS, FOR EVERYONE: the systemic study of human safety in mixed environments provided a foundation for future safety standards;
- OPTIMIZING TIME AND RESOURCES: the optimization core of its high-quality orchestration of its robotic technologies allowed ILIAD to contribute to the optimization of logistic and intralogistic processes, containing all costs and bringing additional value in terms of time and resources spent.