Multi-Robot Planning and Control from CCTV Camera Networks in a Real Warehouse

Abstract:Off-board control of mobile robots from cameras embedded in the environment offers a practical path to scalable autonomy, moving sensing and compute off the robots. We extend this idea from the single-robot case to coordinated fleets in a real warehouse, driving multiple robots with only a distributed CCTV network and edge compute. The system operates entirely in image space over an uncalibrated, pixel-wise topological camera graph, enabling wide-area operation with flexible camera placement. A hierarchical planner selects a camera sequence per robot and plans its image-space motion through each view, coordinating robots with a prioritised-then-joint strategy and treating overlapping camera regions as shared resources held by one robot at a time to prevent collisions and deadlocks. We validate the approach in a real warehouse with four robots and 30 cameras across six 27 m aisles, reporting mission times and coordination statistics. To our knowledge, this is the first field demonstration of multi-robot planning and coordination using only an external camera network and off-board compute, with robots carrying no task-specific navigation hardware.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2606.06762 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2606.06762v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.06762 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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