Autonomous mobile robot based material movement system and method

Abstract

An automated warehouse material movement system and method of moving material in a warehouse, includes a computer based warehouse executive subsystem (WEX) that is programed with computer code to maintain inventory location and quantity information, schedule inventory movement and track inventory movement within the warehouse and a computer based mobile robot automation subsystem (MAS) that is programed with computer code to maintain information of floor layout of the warehouse, maintain information on mobile robots in the warehouse, allocate and deallocate mobile robots to particular missions, control and track movement of mobile robots and provide situational reporting of the mobile robots. A computer based vehicle tasking subsystem (VTS) is programed with computer code to respond to mission commands from the WEX to issue commands to the MAS to reserve and schedule mobile robots including movement of inventory between a source and a destination within the warehouse and to report status information from the MAS to the VTS regarding status of missions. At least one microservice component is configured to be tightly designed, stateless and loosely coupled with said WEX and MAS. The VTS is the at least one microservice component.