Alphabet Soup is a model of a multi-vehicle physical routing system, designed to study control and coordination issues. Inspired by the warehouse mechanics of Kiva Systems, Alphabet Soup offers a high-level environment to study real-world distribution problems involving hundreds of agents. While centered around building words, potential applications range from material handling to nanobot assembly to mass production of highly customized airplanes.  The easily extendable framework is written in Java and is released under the GNU General Public License.

The objective of the Alphabet Soup warehouse is to assemble specific words out of component letters. The inventory of the system are the letter tiles, which are stored in moveable buckets with fixed capacity. The buckets can be picked up and driven around the warehouse by bucketbots. The bucketbots are used to move buckets to and from stations to accomplish the overall system objectives. Letter stations are used to put bundles of letter tiles into buckets, while word stations are used to take individual letters out of buckets to compose words. Stations can interact with the letter tiles in a bucket when the bucketbot has centered the bucket on the location of the station. Stations are typically located on the borders of the map.

Conceptual Drawing

Alphabet Soup Screenshot

Publications

Hazard, Christopher J.; Wurman, Peter R.; DAndrea, Raffaello; Alphabet Soup: A Testbed for Studying Resource Allocation in Multi-vehicle Systems. In Proceedings of the 2006 AAAI Workshop on Auction Mechanisms for Robot Coordination. pp 23-30, Boston, Massachusetts, July 17, 2006. [download]