The Challenges of Driverless Mobile Vehicles in Shared Workspace in the Industry 5.0 Era

In the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and Industry 5.0, driverless material handling technologies are becoming a mainstay of production and distribution facilities and have never been so close to human workers. Laser Guided Vehicles (LGVs) and Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs), with open navigation routes, are increasingly being used in different sectors, sharing the same spaces with the workforce. However, this coexistence poses different challenges when autonomous systems must share workspaces and walkways with human workers. The main concerns revolve around the potential safety risks to workers and disruption to operations. In particular, the performance of the driverless mobile system inevitably suffers from sharing the same environment with unpredictable human activities and movements, causing delays, slowdowns, and inefficiencies in the transport system. Although human-robot interaction can be seen as an advantage, if not properly designed and managed, it can lead to several inefficiencies such as production delays due to speed loss, backlogs, and workstation downtime. A new discrete event simulation model is developed here to support the efficient design of an LGV fleet when human-robot coexistence and interaction need to be considered. This model can combine different design parameters such as the number of vehicles and their performances, safe distances, reaction times, pedestrian paths, and the relative frequency of worker crossings. The aim of this work is to provide a graphical tool that can assist the designer of the LGV fleet in the correct definition of both the number of vehicles and the paths, by supporting the correct assessment of the vehicles’ efficiency and their real performance.