UAVs for Industries and Supply Chain Management

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the feasibility and safety of indoor UAV swarms operating alongside humans for industrial package transportation, highlighting their potential to improve supply chain efficiency within Industry 4.0.

Contribution

It introduces a practical approach for deploying UAV swarms indoors in industrial settings, bridging the gap between UAV technology and supply chain applications.

Findings

UAV swarms can operate safely indoors with humans.

Successful experiments in warehouse environments show effective package transport.

Use of MoCap, ROS, and Unity enables localization and visualization.

Abstract

This work aims at showing that it is feasible and safe to use a swarm of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) indoors alongside humans. UAVs are increasingly being integrated under the Industry 4.0 framework. UAV swarms are primarily deployed outdoors in civil and military applications, but the opportunities for using them in manufacturing and supply chain management are immense. There is extensive research on UAV technology, e.g., localization, control, and computer vision, but less research on the practical application of UAVs in industry. UAV technology could improve data collection and monitoring, enhance decision-making in an Internet of Things framework and automate time-consuming and redundant tasks in the industry. However, there is a gap between the technological developments of UAVs and their integration into the supply chain. Therefore, this work focuses on automating the task of transporting packages utilizing a swarm of small UAVs operating alongside humans. MoCap system, ROS, and unity are used for localization, inter-process communication and visualization. Multiple experiments are performed with the UAVs in wander and swarm mode in a warehouse like environment.