Budget-optimal multi-robot layout design for box sorting

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 to sort packages from given input and output locations. Finding a good layout that minimizes the hardware budget while ensuring motion feasibility is a challenging combinatorial problem with nonconvex motion constraints. We propose a new optimization-based approach that models layout planning as a subgraph optimization problem subject to network flow constraints. Our core insight is to abstract away motion constraints from the layout optimization by precomputing a kinematic reachability graph and then extract the optimal layout on this ground graph. We validate the motion feasibility of our approach by proposing a simple task assignment and motion planning technique. We benchmark our algorithm on problems with various grid resolutions and number of outputs and show improvements in memory efficiency over a heuristic search algorithm. In addition, we demonstrate that our algorithm can be extended to handle various types of robot manipulators and conveyor belts, box payload constraints, and cost assignments.