A Comparative Analysis of Collaborative Robots for Autonomous Mobile Depalletizing Tasks

Mobile manipulators are attractive in industrial warehouses as they are capable of interacting safely with humans, they can navigate in operational spaces and they can be reconfigured for different tasks, thus overcoming limitations of fixed robot cells. This paper presents a comparative analysis of collaborative robots mounted on a mobile base for depalletization tasks in tight spaces due to storage racks. An experimental evaluation is reported in a simulated environment using a geometric motion planner with different robot configurations. Results indicate that the choice of the most appropriate robot to perform a depalletization task is not trivial as it depends on many factors. Therefore, conducting a simulation using motion planning is an effective strategy to evaluate the performance of different robots.