Keywords
Swarm Intelligence
Autonomous Mobile Robots
Abstract
Modern manufacturing facilities — from automotive assembly plants and electronics contract manufacturers to pharmaceutical distribution centers and food processing lines — increasingly depend on the efficient, reliable, and adaptive movement of materials, components, and finished products through complex factory environments. Autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) — self-navigating, independently operated robotic platforms that transport materials without fixed infrastructure — have emerged as the dominant paradigm for flexible factory logistics, replacing conventional conveyor systems and automated guided vehicles (AGVs) with systems that can navigate dynamic, human-populated environments, reroute around obstacles, and adapt to changing production layouts. This review provides a comprehensive synthesis of multi-robot systems and swarm intelligence for autonomous factory logistics, examining multi-robot coordination algorithms, SLAM-based navigation for autonomous mobile robots, perception and scene understanding for warehouse intelligence, 5G URLLC and wireless industrial control for real-time multi-robot coordination, and the integration of autonomous mobile robots within the broader smart factory ecosystem. We further connect these advances to industrial optical sensing technologies — precision 3D surface metrology and four-dimensional thermal imaging — demonstrating how high-fidelity sensing modalities contribute to multi-robot situational awareness and collaborative quality inspection. A central contribution is the articulation of an integrated Autonomous Factory Logistics Architecture (AFLA) that unifies multi-robot coordination, SLAM navigation, 5G-enabled communication, and edge intelligence for the next generation of adaptive, scalable, and resilient factory logistics.
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