SUMINISTRA

The overall objective or mission of the SUMINISTRA project is the Optimisation and Digitalisation of the Supply Chain, focusing on its heart, the warehouse.

SUMINISTRA proposes various innovative research projects integrating areas of knowledge such as unmanned vehicles (UAVs, AGVs), digital twins, distributed robotics, communications and interoperability to drive the transformation of the supply chain. To this end, SUMINISTRA proposes industrial research, in TRL 3 and 4, in areas that enable disruptive innovations for industry that generate greater competitiveness and efficiency.

Main objectives:

• Redesigning a more automated supply chain through unmanned, aerial and ground vehicles, and fostering the development of collaborative environments with humans.
• Adding value to logistics processes, through the development of intelligent systems for inspections and inventory maintenance in warehouses, freeing up skilled staff for higher value-added tasks.
• Acceleration in decision-making, using optimisation and predictive algorithms for functions that contribute to the efficiency of warehouse processes, including the integration of both on-board, collaborative and global intelligence. All this using low latency, high transmission rate 5G communications and high precision indoor positioning.

Use cases:

1. Development of a system that enables the process of taking inventory by drone, ensuring real-time visibility of assets and verification of the disposition of the state of the merchandise in the relevant locations.
2. Deployment of a set of drones to perform asset inspection operations in the aisles of distribution centres.

TST’s contribution:

Design and develop new technologies and solutions for real-time localization of robotic platforms, assets and workers within the context of the Industry 4.0.

Research and develop new technologies to enable higher localization accuracies through data fusion techniques.

Development of a testbed for the validation of hybrid localization (BLE AoA, UWB, etc.) IoT devices.