In the era of e-commerce, the logistic distribution center is put in the center role of order picking for the sake of meeting the needs of different customer orders, hence, improving the automation and work capacity of distribution center becomes research priority in the fields of logistics and warehousing. The objective of this article is to solve the shortcomings of currently traditional distribution center picking system with high automation by introducing a new method of picking provided by Amazon’s Kiva system, that is, mobile racking with goods is broke out to sorting table by Kiva mobile robots named AGVs (automated guided vehicles), which could not only reduce the walk time and labor cost, but improve efficiency. This article starts with the constitutive requirements of the Amazon KIVA robotic systems, and then some key problems of Kiva picking system and design optimization about task allocation and path planning of multi-robots are demonstrated respectively in this article. Finally, the content is summarized and the application of robotic system in is simply demonstrated and prospected.
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