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Comment by the42thdoctor | Hacker News Reader

What types of algorithms are used in this type of problems ?

I’m sure QuickSort is being used somewhere in there…

…though I assume you’re asking specifically about the quasi-autonomous movement of the tote-bots? There is no one single “algorithm” to represent or model their movement, it’s a complex control system.

Probably various optimization algorithms. You'd want to have your robots move the least distance for the work required since that minimises energy use and wear and tear. Some form of knapsack problem would needed to be solved for packaging the goods for delivery optimally. Then there would be scheduling needed to handle incoming jobs effectively.

It's not a difficult problem space. You can use quite simple algorithms for planning the movements of these robots. And you can improve them later without them affecting the rest of the system, which makes this easier than most IT systems which have all kinds of hairy dependencies.

If two grocery carts crash into each other it's not the end of the world. In contrast, if you're writing a distributed database system and you corrupt data then that can be very serious.

Uhh.... Hairy dependencies are very much a problem in this space just like any other type of IT system (in fact worse cause the code is usually written in C++ - so no package manager). Plus the tooling is non-existant... You will still need some type of client server architecture/failover redundancy. You also don't have very many options when it comes to testing. Writing simulations for this and running tests is very non-trivial. The algorithms themselves will need to take into account failures. What happens when one of the robots fails/wears out? (and this WILL happen) Deconflicting the robots is certainly nontrivial. For efficient solutions in this field theres a whole bunch of fairly non-trivial algorithms in Operations Research and planning that exist.

The environment is also hostile to humans so they will need to build a dedicated tow robot that gets stuck robots out of the system.

You just build a platform which can move over the xy grid, and which allows humans to sit on top.

It's quite simple to make sure (using e.g. bumpers) that if a robot crashes into the platform then nobody gets hurt.

Of course a towrobot would be better, but it's not really necessary and it also might get stuck.

I would put money of them using OpenCV and the assorted algos in that library for their vision work.

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