UAV-UGV Multi-robot System for Warehouse Inventory - Scheduling Issues.

Warehouse inventory is a tricky, costly and time-consuming operation. The advent of low cost off-the-shelf UAVs enables companies to envision, at short term, the deployment of fully automated solutions. The present work proposes a solution that sets up UAVs and UGVs for performing such tasks. Task allocation between UAVs and UGVs is driven by efficiency and security criteria. UAVs' role consists in performing the inventory (limited in our study to the task of reading bar codes on pallets located on racks). UGVs's role is to bring-and-drop UAVs at the extremities of aisles and to collect them after the completion of their inventory tasks. UAVs localization, within each aisle, is obtained by UWB-equipped plots installed by UGVs at each extremity of aisles. Resolution of the choreography of the whole, UGVs and UAVs, expressed as an optimization problem, constitutes the core of this work.