Smart Air Cargo Trailer - Autonomous air cargo ground transportation in a mixed traffic environment (SAT): Paper presented at Interdisciplinary Conference on Production, Logistics and Traffic, ICPLT 2021, March 17th-18th, 2021, Darmstadt, Germany, Virtual Conference

The Smart Air Cargo Trailer (SAT) project aims to transport air freight shipments autonomously and according to demand between the freight forwarder and the air freight handler by automating short-haul transports between air cargo handlers and forwarding agents using a cloud-based platform and replacing conventional trucks with automated guided vehicles. The envisioned solution leads to demand-oriented transports, which are carried out, when necessary, on the part of either the shipper or the recipient (variable push-pull control). The self-control algorithm must be able to represent several triggering / decision situations. With the help of camera-supported barcode reading, information about the loaded packages can be captured without interrupting or disturbing the process, thus considerably simplifying the process of outbound scanning. Packages are recognized parallelly and not individually from a video stream and the attached barcodes are read. A special challenge is the recognition of the different packages, the recognition of partially covered barcodes and the handling of different lighting situations. The project identified the necessary requirements for autonomous driving in a mixed traffic environment and evaluated their feasibility according to the current state of the art.