Work-in-Progress: Using Li-Fi to control Automated Guided Vehicles. Steps towards an industrial market product

Li-Fi (Light Fidelity) is a bidirectionnal communication technology that uses visible and infrared LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes) to send data. It has the advantage of simultane-ously illuminating a space as well as sending data. Furthermore, this telecommunication solution also has the advantage of being robust against RF (Radio Frequency) interference and can be deployed in harsh and electromagnetic sensitive environments. These sensitive environments may be industrial facilities where communication systems are sometimes difficult to implement. In this paper, a concrete solution is provided to an existing telecommunication constraint in the fruit industry where some Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) are steered by infrared lasers to move pallets between several stations. These vehicles always perform the same operations and move on the same axis. However, this system presents an alignment constraint between the control system and the AG V. The fact that the laser has a narrow beam and the receiver a narrow reception surface forces the vehicle to be perfectly aligned at all times. In practice, this is not always the case and some vibrations lead to communication losses. In order to overcome this problem, a small-scale solution using the Li-Fi technology is presented in this work and a discussion on the steps until having a commercially available product is presented using the Manufacturing Readiness level (MRL) concept.