A real-time traffic control scheme of multiple AGV systems for collision free minimum time motion: a routing table approach

A two-staged traffic control scheme, in which sets of candidate paths are prepared off-line prior to overall motion planning process, has been widely adopted for motion planning of mobile robots, but relatively little attention has been given to the application of the two-staged scheme to multiple automated guided vehicle systems (MAGVSs). In the paper, a systematic two-staged traffic control scheme is presented to obtain collision-free minimum-time motions of AGVs along loopless paths. The overall structure of the controller is divided into two tandem modules of off-line routing table generator (RTG) and an online traffic controller (OTC). First, an induced network model is established considering the configurational restrictions of guide-paths. With this model and a modified k-shortest path algorithm, RTG finds sets of k candidate paths from each station nodes to all the other station nodes off-line and stores them in the form of routing tables. Each time a dispatch command for an AGV is issued, OTC utilizes these routing tables to generate a collision-free minimum-time motion along a loopless path. Real-time computation is guaranteed in that the time-consuming graph searching process is executed off-line by RTG, and OTC looks for the minimum time motion among the k candidate paths. The traffic control scheme proposed is suitable for practical application in centralized MAGVS with zone blocking technique.