Dr. Stefano V. Albrecht awarded RAEng Industrial Fellowship

Dr. Stefano V. Albrecht has been awarded an Industrial Fellowship by the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng).

Congratulations to Stefano Albrecht who was awarded the Royal Academy of Engineering Industrial Fellowship for his project Multi-agent reinforcement learning for warehouse logistics with robotic and human co-workers 

In future commercial warehouses, many robotic and human workers will collaborate to collect and deliver items. The fundamental problem that this project aims to tackle is how these workers must coordinate their actions in the warehouse to maximise performance (for example, in terms of order throughput) under given resource constraints. 

Existing approaches for order-picking systems in industry based on fixed heuristics require a large engineering effort to operate under specific warehouse layouts and resource constraints, and their achievable performance is often limited by heuristic design limitations. To improve the efficiency and flexibility of warehouse order-picking systems, the project will leverage research in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) in which the workers learn directly through trial-and-error how to optimally collaborate with one another in the warehouse.  

This project will develop and demonstrate MARL-based solutions in real-world warehouse systems involving robotic and human workers through a close partnership with Dematic/KION, a global leader in warehouse automation technologies.

 

Useful links

ECR news announcement

Stefano Albrecht personal page