Search arXivSearch

arXiv · 2310.01077

On Fulfilling the Exigent Need for Automating and Modernizing Logistics Infrastructure in India: Enabling AI-based Integration, Digitalization, and Smart Automation of Industrial Parks and Robotic Warehouses

Abstract

To stay competitive, the Low- or Middle-Income Countries (LMICs) need to embrace Industry 4.0 and Logistics 4.0. This requires government-level interventions and policy-making to incentivize quality product solutions and drive innovation in traditionally resistant economic sectors. In this position paper, we support the establishment of Smart Industrial Parks (SIPs) with a focus on enhancing operational efficiencies and bringing together MSMEs and startups targeting niche clientele with innovative Industry 4.0 solutions. SIPs along with the phased deployment of well-planned robotic automation technologies shall enable bringing down India's untenable logistics costs. Toward the successful execution of SIPs, we are required to implement the efficient allocation of manufacturing resources and capabilities within SIPs. Thus, we emphasize the importance of efficient resource utilization, collaboration, and technology adoption in industrial parks to promote industrial development and economic growth. We advocate the use of a cloud-based cyber-physical system for real-time data access and analysis in SIPs. Such centralized cloud-based monitoring of factory floors, warehouses, and industrial units using IoT infrastructure shall improve decision-making, efficiency, and safety. Digital Twins (DTs), which are cyber-replicas of physical systems, could play a significant role in enabling simulation, optimization, and real-time monitoring of smart manufacturing and distributed manufacturing systems. However, there are several challenges involved in implementing DTs in distributed manufacturing systems, such as defining data schemas and collaboration protocols, ensuring interoperability, the need for effective authentication technology, distributed machine learning models, and scalability to manage multiple DTs.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Shaurya Shriyam, Prashant Palkar, Amber Srivastava. 2023-10-02. On Fulfilling the Exigent Need for Automating and Modernizing Logistics Infrastructure in India: Enabling AI-based Integration, Digitalization, and Smart Automation of Industrial Parks and Robotic Warehouses. https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.01077

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Humanoid Whole-Body Badminton via an Annealed Reinforcement Learning Curriculum

Humanoid robots have demonstrated strong capabilities for interacting with static scenes across locomotion and manipulation, yet dynamic real-world interactions remain challenging. As a step toward fast-moving object interactions, we present an RL training pipeline that yields a unified whole-body controller for humanoid badminton, coordinating footwork and striking without motion priors or expert demonstrations. In badminton, locomotion and striking are tightly coupled, making the final hitting objective difficult to optimize directly due to sparse rewards and conflicting gradients. We address this with an annealed curriculum that first stabilizes learning through auxiliary locomotion objectives, then progressively removes them to focus optimization on the final hitting objective. For deployment, we use an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) to estimate and predict shuttlecock trajectories for target striking, and also develop a prediction-free variant that removes the EKF and explicit prediction. We validate the framework in simulation and on hardware. In simulation, two robots sustain a rally of 21 consecutive hits. In real-world tests with both machine-fed shuttles and human-robot rallies, the robot achieves outgoing shuttle speeds up to 19.1 m/s. Moreover, the prediction-free variant attains comparable performance to the EKF-based policy. Overall, our approach enables dynamic yet precise goal striking in humanoid badminton and suggests a path toward more dynamics-critical whole-body interaction tasks.

cs.RO

CREPES-X: Hierarchical Bearing-Distance-Inertial Direct Cooperative Relative Pose Estimation System

Relative localization is essential for cooperation in autonomous multi-robot systems. Existing approaches either rely on shared environmental features or inertial assumptions, or they degrade under pairwise non-line-of-sight conditions and outliers in complex environments. Robustly and efficiently fusing inter-robot bearings, distances, and inertial measurements for tens of robots remains challenging. We present CREPES-X (Cooperative RElative Pose Estimation System with multiple eXtended features), a hierarchical relative localization framework that enhances speed, accuracy, and robustness under challenging conditions, without requiring any global information. The hardware packs infrared (IR) LEDs, an IR camera, an ultra-wideband module, and an IMU into a cube no larger than $6\,\text{cm}$ on each side. On this hardware, a two-stage hierarchical estimator meets different latency, accuracy, and robustness requirements. The single-frame estimator returns instantaneous relative poses from a closed-form solution with bearing outlier rejection. The multi-frame estimator then refines these poses with IMU pre-integration under robocentric relative kinematics, using loosely- and tightly-coupled optimization. Extensive simulations and real-world experiments validate the effectiveness of CREPES-X, demonstrating robustness of up to $90\%$ bearing outliers, resilience in challenging conditions, and RMSE of $7.0\,\text{cm}$ and $2.2^\circ$ in real-world datasets.

cs.RO

SurfSLAM: Sim-to-Real Underwater Stereo Reconstruction For Real-Time SLAM

Localization and mapping are core perceptual capabilities for underwater robots. Stereo cameras provide a low-cost means of directly estimating metric depth to support these tasks. However, despite recent advances in stereo depth estimation on land, computing depth from image pairs in underwater scenes remains challenging. In underwater environments, images are degraded by light attenuation, visual artifacts, and dynamic lighting conditions. Furthermore, real-world underwater scenes frequently lack rich texture useful for stereo depth estimation and 3D reconstruction. As a result, stereo estimation networks trained on in-air data cannot transfer directly to the underwater domain. In addition, there is a lack of real-world underwater stereo datasets for supervised training of neural networks. Poor underwater depth estimation is compounded in stereo-based Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithms, making it a fundamental challenge for underwater robot perception. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework that enables sim-to-real training of underwater stereo disparity estimation networks using simulated data and self-supervised finetuning. We leverage our learned depth predictions to develop SurfSLAM, a novel framework for real-time underwater SLAM that fuses stereo cameras with IMU, barometric, and Doppler Velocity Log (DVL) measurements. Lastly, we collect a challenging real-world dataset of shipwreck surveys using an underwater robot. Our dataset features over 24,000 stereo pairs, along with high-quality, dense photogrammetry models and reference trajectories for evaluation. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the advantages of the proposed training approach on real-world data for improving stereo estimation in the underwater domain and for enabling accurate trajectory estimation and 3D reconstruction of complex shipwreck sites.

cs.RO