Coordinating Hundreds of Autonomous Vehicles in Warehouses

Kiva's mobile fulfillment system blends techniques from AI,
Controls Systems, Machine Learning, Operations Research and
other engineering disciplines into the world's largest mobile
robotic platform. Kiva uses hundreds of mobile robots to carry
inventory shelves around distribution centers for customers like
Staples, Walgreens, and The Gap. Kiva currently has equipment in
over 30 warehouses in three countries. This talk will describe the
application domain and the solution, and some of the practical
problems that Kiva has solved along the way.
Pete Wurman is the Chief Technology Officer and Technical Co-
Founder at Kiva Systems where he guides the hardware and
software research efforts. Prior to joining Kiva, Pete was an
Associate Professor of Computer Science at North Carolina State,
where he served as co-director of the university's E-commerce
Program and a member of the faculty of its Operations Research
program. He has spent the past decade researching multi-agent
resource planning, game theory and computational mechanism
design. Pete holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a MS and a Doctorate
in Computer Science from the University of Michigan.