TY - JOUR U1 - Zeitschriftenartikel, wissenschaftlich - begutachtet (reviewed) A1 - Stoyanov, Todor A1 - Vaskevicius, Narunas A1 - Müller, Christian Atanas A1 - Fromm, Tobias A1 - Krug, Robert A1 - Tincani, Vinicio A1 - Mojtahedzadeh, Rasoul A1 - Kunaschk, Stefan A1 - Mortensen Ernits, Rafael A1 - Canelhas, Daniel A1 - Bonilla, Manuel A1 - Schwertfeger, Sören A1 - Bonini, Marco A1 - Halfar, Harry A1 - Pathak, Kaustubh A1 - Rohde, Moritz A1 - Fantoni, Gualtiero A1 - Bicchi, Antonio A1 - Birk, Andreas A1 - Lilienthal, Achim A1 - Echelmeyer, Wolfgang T1 - No more heavy lifting : robotic solutions to the container-unloading problem JF - IEEE robotics & automation magazine N2 - This article discusses the scientifically and industrially important problem of automating the process of unloading goods from standard shipping containers. We outline some of the challenges barring further adoption of robotic solutions to this problem, ranging from handling a vast variety of shapes, sizes, weights, appearances, and packing arrangements of the goods, through hard demands on unloading speed and reliability, to ensuring that fragile goods are not damaged. We propose a modular and reconfigurable software framework in an attempt to efficiently address some of these challenges. We also outline the general framework design and the basic functionality of the core modules developed. We present two instantiations of the software system on two different fully integrated demonstrators: 1) coping with an industrial scenario, i.e., the automated unloading of coffee sacks with an already economically interesting performance; and 2) a scenario used to demonstrate the capabilities of our scientific and technological developments in the context of medium- to long-term prospects of automation in logistics. We performed evaluations that allowed us to summarize several important lessons learned and to identify future directions of research on autonomous robots for the handling of goods in logistics applications. Y1 - 2016 SN - 1070-9932 SS - 1070-9932 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1109/MRA.2016.2535098 DO - https://doi.org/10.1109/MRA.2016.2535098 VL - 23 IS - 4 SP - 94 EP - 106 S1 - 13 PB - IEEE CY - New York, NY ER -