A Wearable Pick-By-Haptics System to Improve Manual-Picking Tasks in Warehouses

This paper presents a novel pick-by-haptics approach to assist workers in manual picking in warehouses. The idea is to equip the worker with a wearable system composed by a vibromotor, a Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) reader and a microcontroller, all placed on the user’s forearm, and exploit it to reveal the correct locations of the items to pick. The system results very intuitive to use as proved by a user study involving 13 subjects that simulated the picking of a list of items. Moreover, the structural setup of the warehouse necessary to implement the pick-by-haptics approach resulted very quick and costly efficient if compared with the current state of the art solutions for workers assistance. The work was motivated by a collaboration with a company that produces controllers for automated plants. The next step of this research will be an experimental campaign in the real warehouse.