cellumation GmbH manufactures innovative conveyor technology on the basis of which completely new applications can be created in the field of material flow systems. One application is the sorting of parcel shipments both in distribution centres and on the "last mile". Due to the development of e-commerce in the last few years with strongly increasing numbers of parcel shipments, among other things due to the pandemic, the need to be able to handle this flood of parcels is obvious. As a modular, individually controllable system, the celluveyor can contribute to relieving inner cities of delivery traffic by creating local distribution centres (micro-hubs) and connecting cargo bike service providers.

The aim of the OptiPath project is to make path planning and execution more robust and efficient, and to make the setup of the complex traversing functions usable and customisable for technicians and integrators. On the one hand, clear geometric and therefore intuitively visualisable control elements (conditions) for path planning are to be designed. On the other hand, novel path planning and path execution methods based on numerical optimisation of single paths and reinforcement learning are to be developed and integrated, which can take the geometric constraints into account.

Innovations and perspectives

The planned project results aim in two directions. On the one hand, there are hardly any market-ready multi-agent systems that can deal with many often colliding paths. This is a unique selling point for the celluveyor. On the other hand, this type of system is completely unknown in the field of conveyor technology, as there is still hardly any omnidirectional conveyor technology, and therefore provides cellumation GmbH with a decisive innovation-driven market advantage.