AGVs
“THE CONTOUR-BASED
GEO-NAVIGATION SYSTEM
GUIDES THE AGVs SAFELY AND
EFFICIENTLY THROUGH THE
WAREHOUSE WITHOUT ADDING
ADDITIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE
FOR ORIENTATION”
Phillip Stephan, product manager for robotics, Linde Materials Handling
Advanced Lift-truck Technology International 2019 53
become more affordable as the
industry has developed, making
vehicle automation a much more
attractive investment. The gap
between vehicle-automation cost
and labor cost is ever-closing
worldwide, which will contribute to
exponential growth of the sector.
The affordability really puts vehicle
automation on the front foot when
comparing with fixed automation.”
Industry 4.0 at work
Industry 4.0 has had a significant
effect on the attractiveness of
AGVs in a range of industries and
businesses. When connectivity, the
Internet of Things and the Internet
of Systems merge, it results in some
very smart equipment.
Kari Johansson, solutions
management director for Finnish
AGV company Rocla, believes that
the AGV market is growing and
technology is developing at the same
pace. He notes that when integration
is seamless, customers can combine
different modules together easily and
reduce the high ICT cost that
integration may have had in the past.
“Sensor and navigation technology
development have helped, but the
biggest developments have happened
in software. The AGV industry must
respond to a challenge to make
systems easy and seamless to integrate
to customers’ control systems. Rocla is
developing this integration level, not
only upwards to the enterprise
resource planning system (ERP),
manufacturing execution system
(MES) and the warehouse
management system (WMS), but
also horizontally between automation
systems,” says Johansson.
Technology has enabled AGVs to
grow market share in non-traditional
areas such as warehousing. Toyota’s
Beveridge believes that vehicle
automation is becoming more
accepted by a wide range of industries,
and end-users are increasingly
trusting in the technology to deliver
precision, optimization and safety
over manual forklifts. “In recent years,
there has been a large shift towards
automating warehouse logistics where
conventional forklifts are
predominately used. This has been
due to a number of factors such as
the availability of hybrid AGVs with
vision-aided load handling, intelligent
integrated logistics allowing scalable
solutions and large fluctuations in
throughput demands leading to
labour issues,” he says.
Beveridge adds that introducing
vehicle automation into these
traditional forklift areas is also a more
cost-effective solution than fixed
automation, as it is less intrusive to
the existing operations and the ROI
is often as low as one to two years.
Finding the way
In the warehouse environment, speed
and efficiency are key. Anderson, of
Amerden AGVS, believes that
advances in navigation have made
AGVs highly competitive. “The
Amerden Kollmorgen Natural
Navigation (NN) system is being
constantly improved to be used in
dynamic areas, such as warehouses
where the load volume varies a lot,” he
says. “NN is making a big impact on
implementation speed and accuracy.
The software modules have become
more standard and dispatch and
traffic routines are configured
automatically by downloading a
detailed CAD drawing. A complex
ABOVE: Dental equipment
manufacturer Planmeca
uses Rocla AGVs in its
warehouse. The machines
can carry out tasks
autonomously, but if
necessary, they can be
operated manually via
remote control