Robotic systems are routinely used in the logistics industry to enhance operational efficiency, but the design of robot workspaces remains a complex and manual task, which limits the system's flexibility to changing demands. This paper aims to automate robot workspace design by proposing a computational framework to generate a budget-minimizing layout by selectively placing stationary robots on a floor grid, which includes robotic arms and conveyor belts, and plan their cooperative motions to sort packages from given input and output locations. We propose a hierarchical solving strategy that first optimizes the layout to minimize the hardware budget with a subgraph optimization subject to network flow constraints, followed by task allocation and motion planning based on the generated layout. In addition, we demonstrate how to model conveyor belts as manipulators with multiple end effectors to integrate them into our design and planning framework. We evaluated our framework on a set of simulated scenarios and showed that it can generate optimal layouts and collision-free motion trajectories, adapting to different available robots, cost assignments, and box payloads.

翻译：机器人系统在物流行业中已常规用于提升运营效率，但机器人工作空间的设计仍是一项复杂且依赖人工的任务，这限制了系统应对需求变化的灵活性。本文旨在实现机器人工作空间设计的自动化，提出一种计算框架，通过在地面网格上有选择地布置固定机器人（包括机械臂和传送带）来生成预算最小化的布局，并规划其协作运动，以将包裹从给定的输入位置分拣至输出位置。我们提出一种分层求解策略：首先在满足网络流约束的条件下，通过子图优化来优化布局以最小化硬件预算；随后基于生成的布局进行任务分配与运动规划。此外，我们演示了如何将传送带建模为具有多个末端执行器的机械臂，以将其整合到我们的设计与规划框架中。我们在系列仿真场景中评估了该框架，结果表明其能够生成最优布局和无碰撞运动轨迹，并能适应不同的可用机器人、成本分配方案及箱体负载。