Comprehensive Comparative Analysis of Robot Types and Formation Technologies in Warehouse Environments

In recent years, the demand for multi-robot cooperative operations in the warehousing and logistics industry has been growing rapidly, and how to move goods efficiently has become an important challenge. To cope with the challenge, this paper aims to deeply study the selection of robot types and formation strategies in warehouse environment to improve the efficiency of accomplishing multi-robot cooperative handling tasks. The article realizes the cooperative work of formations to accomplish handling tasks by designing two common robot models and two main formation strategies. A detailed comparative analysis is carried out in terms of obstacle collision risk, maintenance of formation shape and formation passability, and the experimental results comprehensively show that the combination of two-wheeled differential drive robots using virtual structure formation is more suitable for the warehouse environment, which is a reference and guidance for the practical application of multi-robots in warehousing.