Autonomous Warehouse Navigation using 3 D Time-of-Flight Cameras

This paper presents an overview of the navigation system of an autonomous forklift being developed within the publicly funded project FTF-out-of-the-box. The control of the vehicle is accomplished by means of storage requests initiated by a human operator using speech control. Instead of the commonly used 2D laser range finders we make use of Timeof-Flight (ToF) cameras for the entire vehicle navigation. We explain what parts of typical navigation stacks have to be adjusted for this type of sensor. Experimental results obtained in a warehouse environment are presented. 1