A 3D Data Acquisition Cart with Applications to Warehouse Automation

摘要

Automated Guided Vehicles (AGV) are increasingly being adopted for warehouse automation. This work focuses on the design and fabrication of a 3D Data Acquisition Cart (3D-DAC) with applications to warehouse automation. The 3D-DAC facilitates acquiring large scale data sets without the overhead of requiring an AGV. It integrates on-board computing and power, optical wheel encoders, and a Velodyne VLP-16 Puck LiDAR for exteroceptive sensing. Three-dimensional (3D) LiDARs like the Velodyne Puck are becoming the sensor of choice for not only robot navigation, but also for other tasks such as pallet detection and picking and dropping to name but a few. In this thesis, we demonstrated real-time mobile data logging with the 3D-DAC. Results were validated in a Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) task. Preliminary results indicate the potential to map warehouses on the order of 10,000 square meters with an accuracy of several centimeters.