Warehouse Automation Testing

Warehouse Automation (WA) and Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMR) development is a hot topic. Nowadays, in an online shopping and delivery world, the biggest companies are investing in developing these systems. Thus, verification and validation of them is another challenge for the developers.

Quality has several aspects such as operability, maintainability, recoverability, performance, usability and efficiency. These are important for every product, but especially for the WA systems, even more since the main idea is increasing efficiency and productivity. Recoverability is also very significant since the whole warehouse operations may be stuck in case of a fatal error.

As far as the test automation is taken into consideration, there are several challenges coming into place. There are robots and hardware components like sensors and perception modules making automation more difficult. Every customer has a different warehouse, meaning a different configuration. The system should be ensured to be supporting different configurations like the number of robots moving around, number of items in the warehouse, map of the area and priority of the orders. Reusability of tests should be maintained to reduce duplication and maintenance effort.

Experiences based on warehouse automation testing may be extended to any test automation project since the proposals target code quality improvement. Some of the problems to be discussed are: 

• Testability issues
• Hardware dependency
• Non functionality
• Reproduction of bugs
• Continuous maintenance