GNSS-Denied RobGisTics: Toward Autonomous UAV-UGV Intralogistics in Industrial Environments

The Netherlands is a global leader in high-tech industries, advanced intralogistics, and precision agriculture, sectors that increasingly rely on automation and robotics to maintain their competitive edge. Large-scale indoor environments such as warehouses, greenhouses, and livestock barns form the backbone of these industries. Accurate and safe deployment of robots in these environments is becoming an increasingly attractive goal for SMEs due to the high potential for automating intralogistics operations such as data collection, surveillance, inspection, and interaction using various sensors. For example, drones can significantly improve inventory code scanning in warehouses where workers face practical difficulties accessing tight and high racks without industrial cranes/ladders. Likewise, mobile robots can autonomously navigate livestock barns to monitor food volume and feed animals as required.
However, indoor autonomous deployment of robots remains challenging for SMEs due to the unavailability of GPS and the necessity to integrate different algorithms. Accordingly, RoboGisTics has been proposed in response to the requests of our industrial partners to investigate and develop commercial and robust technologies capable of accurately measuring the position and orientation of robots, while establishing a modular and infrastructure-free framework to deploy both aerial and ground robots in the partners (end-users) greenhouse, warehouse and livestock barns.
RoboGisTics is a ROS2-based-open-source framework building on the promising results of two previous KIEM projects (Skyworkers and Waredrones), which conducted feasibility studies and proof-of-concept demonstrations for autonomous robot deployment in warehouses. Thus, this project aims to combine and strengthen technologies for visual-based positioning, environment perception, and localization, i.e., key enablers for autonomous navigation in indoor environments. The target applications include intralogistics operations such as drone-based inventory scanning and autonomous food delivery by ground robots.
RoboGisTics leverages the consortium’s combined expertise to develop, test, and validate modular, scalable, and industry-ready solutions that meet real-world marketplace requirements in robustness, applicability, and interoperability.