Implementation of Augmented Reality in Autonomous Warehouses: Challenges and Opportunities

Autonomous warehouses with mobile, rack-carrying robots are starting to become commonplace, with systems such as Amazon's Kiva and Swisslog's CarryPick already implemented in functional warehouses. Such warehouses however still require human intervention for object picking and maintenance. In the European project SafeLog we are developing a safety-vest, used for safety-critical ranging and stopping of mobile robots, an improved planner that can handle large fleets of heterogeneous agents as well as an AR interaction system to navigate and support human workers in such automated environments. Here we present the AR interaction modalities, namely navigation, pick-by-AR and general system interactions that were developed at the moment of writing, as well as the overall system concept and planned future work.