Order Picking with Wearable Computers

Faculty: 
Thad Starner
Students: 
Shawn Wu, Malcolm Haynes

Warehouses throughout the world distribute approximately $1 trillion in goods per year from nearly a million warehouses. Order Picking is the process of collecting items from inventory and sorting them into orders for distribution. It represents one of the main activities performed in warehouses. About 60% of the total operational costs of these warehouses is order picking. Most are still picked by hand, often using paper pick lists. Our objective is to implement and compare various order-picking systems, including:

• Pick-By-Paper list
• Pick-By-Light
• Pick-By-Tablet
• Pick-By-HUD (Heads-Up Display).

Lab: 
Director: 
Thad Starner

The Contextual Computing Group (CCG) creates wearable and ubiquitous computing technologies using techniques from artificial intelligence (AI) and human-computer interaction (HCI). We focus on giving users superpowers through augmenting their senses, improving learning, and providing intelligent assistants in everyday life. Members' long-term projects have included creating wearable computers (Google Glass), teaching manual skills without attention (Passive Haptic Learning), improving hand sensation after traumatic injury (Passive Haptic Rehabilitation), educational technology for the Deaf community, and communicating with dogs and dolphins through computer interfaces (Animal Computer Interaction).