This article discusses the scientifically and industrially important problem of automating the process of unloading goods from standard shipping containers. We outline some of the challenges barring further adoption of robotic solutions to this problem: ranging from handling a vast variety of shapes, sizes, weights, appearance and packing arrangement of the goods, through hard demands on unloading speed and reliability, to ensuring fragile goods are not damaged. We propose a modular and reconfigurable software framework in an attempt at efficiently addressing some of these challenges. We outline the general framework design, as well as the basic functionality of the core modules developed and present two instantiations of the software system on two different fully integrated demonstrators. While one is coping with an industrial scenario, namely the automated unloading of coffee sacks, with an already economically interesting performance, the other scenario is used to demonstrate the capabilities of our scientific and technological developments in the context of medium-to long-term prospects of automation in logistics. We performed evaluations which allow us to summarize several important lessons learned and to identify future directions of research on autonomous robots for handling of goods in logistics applications.
Inflight catering services are crucial for air travel. Airlines provide food and beverages to the passengers during the flight with different options depending on, e.g., the flying class, distance, and type of service. Our contribution outlines previous efforts to optimise the inflight catering processes and highlights the possibilities to individualise the current services. Individualisation is a growing trend and may challenge the processes that are possibly not wholly prepared to deliver a customised meal for each passenger onboard the aircraft. We present our passenger survey which confirms the demand for the individualisation of inflight meals; we explored which dimensions can be supported by incorporating automation. We performed an analysis of the current inflight catering process for developing automation concepts. Subsequently, an automation concept for the individualisation of inflight meals through pre-ordering is introduced, followed by an evaluation scenario. Within the evaluation, it was possible to consider the feasibility of the individualisation of inflight catering meals and to deliver requirements for the further development of automated services.
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