Japanese industrial: 80 AGVs, ROS 2, +40% warehouse throughput.

A fleet of 80 AGVs in a 42,000 m2 warehouse, two collisions per week and a capped throughput. The problem wasn't the robots, it was coordination.

The context

Japanese automated logistics industrial, 3,200 employees, Tokyo hub. Pilot warehouse near Nagoya, 80 AGVs deployed, aging ROS 1 navigation, monocular perception, individual planning with no fleet coordination.

The problem

• Warehouse throughput stagnant for 14 months
• Two collisions/week, one major every two months
• Cumulative downtime: 18% of production time
• Slow navigation in narrow corridors (60 cm margin)
• ROS 1 EOL scheduled, no more security support

The approach

Complete overhaul on ROS 2 Humble with Nav2, LiDAR + RGBD camera sensor fusion for 3D perception, multi-agent planning via Conflict-Based Search. Intensive validation in Isaac simulation before any physical deployment.

The technical pillars

• Perception stack in Rust (p99 latency under 30 ms)
• Customized Nav2 with dynamic costmap shared between agents
• CBS solver for real-time multi-AGV conflict resolution
• Isaac Sim simulation with digital twin of the full warehouse
• Rollout in batches of 10 AGVs, ROS 1 fallback maintained for two months

The stack

• ROS 2 Humble, Nav2, MoveIt 2
• Rust for perception and low-level control
• Cyclone DDS for middleware, fine QoS tuning
• Isaac Sim for validation, Foxglove for observability
• Intel RealSense D455 cameras, Velodyne VLP-16 LiDAR

The results

1. Warehouse throughput: +40%
2. Collisions: zero over 6 months post full deployment
3. Cumulative downtime: 18% to 4%
4. Average AGV speed in corridor: +28%
5. Migration with no production interruption (24/7 maintained)

What we learned

Cyclone DDS is superior to Fast DDS for our case (deterministic latency), but requires serious QoS tuning. The CBS solver scales up to 80 agents, beyond that you need a hierarchical approach. Honest mistake: we underestimated LiDAR calibration time (two weeks more than planned). To redo: involve warehouse operators from the simulation phase, their feedback avoided three bad design decisions.