Research on AGV Guided by Real-time Locating System (RTLS) for Material Distribution

Abstract

In discrete manufacturing workshop, traditional manual material distribution method lacks of unified scheduling and supervision due to a bottleneck of capturing real-time in-formation. Considering these problems, this paper raises the concept "R-AGV (RTLS-based Auto Guided Vehicle)" and proposes the framework of R-AGV-based material dis-tribution scheme on the basis of RTLS platform and workshop electronic map. Then under the principle of shortest transport distance (STD), we put forward the path planning algo-rithm including global path planning algorithm for designing route of R-AGV and local multi-sensors fusion algorithm for avoiding obstacle. Considering experimental purpose, we develop a simplified 8-workstation prototype system capturing the main characteris-tics of the real discrete manufacturing workshop. Our analysis and experiment results show that the R-AGV-based material distribution system provides new levels of process visibility and efficiency comparing to traditional AGV-based distributing systems.