Integration of mobile vehicles for automated material handlingusing Profibus and IEEE 802.11 networks
Suk Lee; Kyung Chang Lee; Man Hyung Lee; Harashima, F.
Industrial Electronics, IEEE Transactions on
Volume 49, Issue 3, Jun 2002 Page(s):693 - 701
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TIE.2002.1005397
Summary:This paper focuses on a method to integrate mobile devices such as
a mobile robot, automated guided vehicle, and unmanned container
transporter to form an automated material handling system. In this
paper, the stationary devices are connected via a Profibus network while
the mobile devices are communicating via an IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN. In
order to integrate these two networks, a protocol converter is developed
on a PC platform that runs two interacting processes with shared
internal buffers. The protocol converter performs a role of translator
between two different protocols by converting the format of a data
frame. In addition to this basic conversion function, the protocol
converter has a virtual polling algorithm to reduce the uncertainty
involved in accessing the wireless network. Finally, the integrated
network. of Profibus and IEEE 802.11 is experimentally evaluated for its
data latency and throughput, which shows the feasibility of the
Profibus-IEEE 802.11 network for industrial applications involving
mobile devices
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