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Despite their enormous potential, the use of indoor localization systems (ILS) remains seldom. One reason is the lack of market transparency and stakeholders’ trust in the systems’ performance as a consequence of insufficient use of test and evaluation (T&E) methodologies. The heterogeneous nature of ILS, their influences, and their applications pose various challenges for the design of a methodology that provides meaningful results. Methodologies for building-wide testing exist, but their use is mostly limited to associated indoor localization competitions. In this work, the T&E 4iLoc Framework is proposed—a methodology for T&E of indoor localization systems in semi-controlled environments based on a system-level and black-box approach. In contrast to building-wide testing, T&E in semi-controlled environments, such as test halls, is characterized by lower costs, higher reproducibility, and better comparability of the results. The limitation of low transferability to real-world applications is addressed by an application-driven design approach. The empirical validation of the T&E 4iLoc Framework, based on the examination of a contour-based light detection and ranging (LiDAR) ILS, an ultra wideband ILS, and a camera-based ILS for the application of automated guided vehicles in warehouse operation, demonstrates the benefits of T&E with the T&E 4iLoc Framework.
Controlling a fleet of autonomous mobile robots (AMR) is a complex problem of optimization. Many approached have been conducted for solving this problem. They range from heuristics, which usually do not find an optimum, to mathematical models, which are limited due to their high computational effort. Machine Learning (ML) methods offer another potential trajectory for solving such complex problems. The focus of this brief survey is on Reinforcement Learning (RL) as a particular type of ML. Due to the reward-based optimization, RL offers a good basis for the control of fleets of AMR. In the context of this survey, different control approaches are investigated and the aspects of fleet control of AMR with respect to RL are evaluated. As a result, six fundamental key problems should be put on the current research agenda to enable a broader application in industry: (1) overcoming the “sim-to-real gap”, (2) increasing the robustness of algorithms, (3) improving data efficiency, (4) integrating different fields of application, (5) enabling heterogeneous fleets with different types of AMR and (6) handling of deadlocks.
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