Autonomous Forklifts for Warehouse Automation: A Comprehensive Review

Despite decades of research, autonomous forklifts remain deployed at a small scale (2–50 vehicles), while industrial warehouses require coordinating hundreds of vehicles in environments shared with human workers. This systematic review analyzes forklift-specific autonomous technologies published between 2010 and 2025 across major robotics databases (including IEEE Xplore, ACM, Elsevier, and related venues) to identify deployment barriers. Following the PRISMA guidelines, we systematically selected 122 peer-reviewed papers addressing forklift-specific challenges across eight subsystems: vehicle modeling, localization, planning, control, vision-based manipulation, multi-vehicle coordination, and safety. We synthesized 80 methods through 8 standardized comparison tables with quality assessment based on validation rigor. State-of-the-art approaches demonstrate strong laboratory performance: localization achieving ±1.4 mm accuracy, control enabling sub-centimeter manipulation, planning reducing mission times by 2–55%, vision reaching 98%+ recognition, and safety frameworks cutting rollover risk by 53–59%. However, validation predominantly occurs at laboratory scale, revealing a critical deployment gap. These achievements do not scale to industrial environments due to fleet coordination complexity, payload variability, and unpredictable human behavior. Our contributions include the following: (1) performance rankings with technology selection guidance, (2) systematic gap characterization, and (3) research priorities addressing mixed-fleet coordination, learning-enhanced control, and human-aware safety. This review was not prospectively registered.