Harmonization of Research and Development Activities Toward Standardization in the Automated Warehousing Systems

In this chapter, we describe some ideas of robotic system standardization based on ongoing research and development processes in a European FP7 project named EC-SAFEMOBIL, which is focused on estimation and control technologies for safe, wireless, high-mobility cooperative systems. Strongly influenced by the European Commission, demand has been to commercialize as many project results as possible, EC-SAFEMOBIL researchers and developers needed some standards to follow for the main project application areas unmanned aerial systems (UAS) and automated warehousing systems (AWS). Although many aspects of UAS are covered by adequate standards, this does not hold true for automated warehouses. In the given analysis of possible standardization of automated warehousing systems, we elaborate on ideas on how to overcome evident gaps between academic achievements and viable industry practice. Paying particular attention to process and development standards, as well as function-specific standards, we describe our view of reaching new standards in automated warehousing systems, particularly with a number of deployed automated guided vehicles (AGVs). This involves adopting or extending existing standards from other application areas (UAS), creating new ones, and defining standard benchmark tests. We have proposed a few benchmark scenarios for testing two system functionalities-marker-less indoor localization and distributed control.