A Novel Approach for Scheduling and Routing of the Self Guided Vehicles in Mesh Topology Using Velocity Control and Alternate Path Techniques

Self Guided Vehicle or Automated Guided Vehicle (or SGVs for short) is a mobile robot which uses markers or wires in the floor, or uses vision or lasers for its movement. SGVs are .becoming popular in automated material handling systems, flexible manufacturing systems and even containers handling applications in container terminals. It is important to route SGVs efficiently, particularly free from deadlocks, head on collisions etc. In many applications, such as container terminals, the working site is divided in the form of rectangles, which leads to a mesh-like path topology. Therefore, developing efficient algorithms for SGV routing and scheduling on the mesh topology has become an important research topic. In this paper, a couple of procedures for routing and scheduling of SGV's on mesh topology is introduced.