Augmented Reality in the Warehouse

This article is from last year, but I just found it.  It describes a great POC about using computer vision to produce augmented reality in a warehouse for pickers who are picking inventory.

Most of my client work over the past few years has been clients in warehousing and logistics, I found this extremely fascinating.  Ususally, The goals for a Picker (the person picking inventory from storage for an order) are:

1. Be told which location in the warehouse has the inventory that needs to be picked
2. Have the picks presented in a logical order to minimize the distance the the picker needs to travel to gather the items for orders they are picking
3. Group the items being picked for different orders (usually JIT barcode that they can attach to the inventory).

The POC was done by DHL for their customer Ricoh in the Netherlands.

Here are some great pictures of what the picking looked like:

The visuals were displayed using Google's (now discontinued?) Glass wearable.

Here is a visual displaying the quantity to be picked, the aisle and location of the current pick as well as an indicator of where the next pick will be:

DHL research released a whitepaper just this past August.  This interests me so I've reached out to DHL to get more details about it (such as whether it ever went to production).