Design and Development of Autonomous Guided Vehicle for Flexible Manufacturing

This paper contributes to designing and developing an autonomous guided vehicle for flexible manufacturing. This robot system consists of 2 main sections, which are server with scheduling software and the autonomous guided vehicle. For flexible manufacturing, working maps and tasks can be changed on the server through the scheduling software. After the operator creates a working map and tasks, path planning information will be sent to the robot. When the robot receives an information from the server, the robot position and orientation will be calculated. Then, the robot utilizes the path planning information to generate the local planning for itself to move to the target station. While moving to the goal station, if an un-predefined obstacle occurred on the robot's trajectory, the robot would avoid that obstacle and then go back to its trajectory. The performance of a completed system was evaluated. The results indicated that this system could operate properly. For the scheduling software on the server side, the map and tasks can be changed depending on the manufacturing scenario. The robot can carry a load of 200 kg. The maximum velocity is 1 m/s. Furthermore, the AVG can climb 11 degrees ramp.