Barcode Mapping in Warehouses

Abstract: Automation in warehouses has been improved in a very certain manner, combining sensors for perception of the environment and mapping of the warehouse. The most common characteristic, which makes the products and the pallet rack cells discriminative, are the barcodes placed on them. This means that the warehouse management system should successfully perceive all the necessary information of the detected barcodes, which also includes their position in the warehouse and build a barcode map of the environment. For this process a barcode reader is needed, with extended capabilities such as estimation of the 3-dimensional coordinates of the barcodes. The main idea of this research was the development of a system to be used in future work, placed on the roof of a forklift, which will be able to detect the barcodes and localize itself using an existing map of the warehouse and update new information in this map. However, the purpose of this project was the investigation of a suitable system for barcode mapping. The main challenge of this project was the development of a barcode reader, which fulfills all the referred capabilities and the comparison with a commercial reader in order to evaluate the performance of the system. In this project a barcode reader was developed using software libraries and a camera for industrial use. The performance of the system was compared with a commercial barcode reader. Moreover, an algorithm was implemented, for estimation of the position of each detected barcode, with reference to the position of the camera's lens.  According to the results of all the investigations the performance of the developed system was quiet satisfying and promising. The comparison of the two systems proved that the commercial barcode reader had a better performance than the implemented system. However, it lacked the ability to provide the required information for mapping also the flexibility for integration with other systems. Overall, the developed system proved to be suitable for integration with a warehouse management system for barcode mapping of the environment.