SmartTrolley: An Experimental Mobile Platform for Indoor Localization in Warehouses

Warehouses and industrial sites are getting more and more interest in automating their workflow; in such an environment, a robust localization method is required to accomplish safe navigation indoors. One widely used scheme is the usage of custom AGVs and dedicated infrastructures to automate moving goods within the warehouse; however, such a solution needs to modify the infrastructure or to make custom robots that fit the existing infrastructure, which requires an important investment. In this paper, we present and validate the SmartTrolley, a generic, modular, and scalable experimental platform for usage in warehouses and industrial sites; able to localize itself in the environment using a scan matching and EKF based indoor Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithm.