Advances In Guidance Systems For Industrial Automated Guided Vehicles
Wiley D. Holcombe, Stephen L. Dickerson, James W. Larsen, Ronald A. Bohlander · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1989
We have focused our research on Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) which travel over a network of allowed paths defined in software and navigate using data from several types of sensors. This technology should be more flexible to install and modify, and opens the door to added capabilities and innovative control strategies. We are experimenting with a prototype, test-bed vehicle which navigates by dead reckoning from odo etry and by periodically measuring its absolute position with a simple machine vision system. Ongoing research seeks methods of adaptive improvement of system parameters affecting guidance. We have also develo' - a novel correlating camera that "watches the floor go by' to make non-contact displacement measurements that can comple ent odometry. Accuracies of 1 part in 3000 appear to be achievable from this device. For navigating inside semi-trailers, we have investigated a wall-following application of ultrasonic ranging.