Designing a Collaborative Socio-Technical System for a Hybrid Human-Robot Picking Process

Project Name: Designing a Collaborative Socio-Technical System for a Hybrid Human-Robot Picking Process

Project client: ARRS Public agency of the Republic of Slovenia for research activities

Time frame: 1. 1. 2023 – 31. 12. 2024

Project coordinator: UM Faculty of Logistics

Participating organizations: Saarland University

Brief summary of the project:

Warehouses represent important nodes in the supply chains of the future. Many processes are carried out in warehouses, the most important of which is the ordering process, which is extremely time- and cost-intensive. The traditional process of manual order picking presents employees (commissioners) with the possibility of a high risk of musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) and injuries to the lumbar spine.

To reduce the workload of employees during the ordering process, we can nowadays use existing automation and robotization solutions, such as autonomous mobile robots (autonomous mobile robots, AMR), which make it possible to improve the productivity of the warehouse system.

The term hybrid order picking system (HOPS) was first introduced in their research in 2021 by the authors Winkelhaus et al. (2021). The HOPS concept includes a picking system in which AMRs and employees (commissioners) participate in the picking process in the warehouse.