Automated Guided Vehicles

Automated Guided Vehicles are helpful in transporting the raw materials, semi-finished products and finished products within a work place. Initially in any industry or a work place, the materials are transported from one work station to another work station manually or by using a vehicle which is operated by the human. Because of the manual interaction the time taken for transporting the materials is high and because of the high time the production rate of an industry comes down. So in order to increase the production rate and to utilize the resources like labor, machine efficiently in an industry the Automated Guided Vehicles have been brought into existence. The Automated Guided Vehicles cannot be installed in a work place as such. It needs lot of planning and designing. This is because the installation of the Automated Guided Vehicles is costlier and once installed it would be difficult to change them. Thus before installing the Automated Guided Vehicles the place of installation and movement region of the Automated Guided Vehicles should be pre-determined.





Layout of the company plays a vital role in the Automated Guided Vehicles system installation. The basic purpose of Automated Guided Vehicles is to reduce the time of travel of the raw material or the work piece. So the shortest route between the workstations has to be identified and the track of the Automated Guided Vehicles should be set on that track so that movement is minimized. Also the movement of the Automated Guided Vehicles should not clash with the other and the design has to be done in such a way to prevent the intersection of the Automated Guided Vehicles. These vehicles are mostly battery operated and thus the region of charging the battery has to be pre-determined. There are two ways of charging the vehicles. The first one is charging in the workstations itself and this can be done when the vehicle stops in the station for loading and unloading. The second method is by charging in a separate region and this means that once the vehicle runs out of charge, the Automated Guided Vehicle moves to the charging region and gets charge. Either of this can be chosen based on the requirement for the company.

The movement of the Automated Guided Vehicles can be controlled in many ways. The easy way of controlling the movement is by sensing the frequency by the sensor that is attached to the vehicle and the frequency will be transmitted in the path by the wires. Then a slot can be made to locate the path of Automated Guided Vehicles and the vehicle can be made to move in that stipulated path by providing pin like material that would follow the slot in the ground. The path of the Automated Guided Vehicles can be colored and then a sensor can be placed in the vehicle to make it move only in the path where it is colored. Thus Automated Guided Vehicle system is one of the useful technical advancement that has reduced the human involvement in the material handling and thus increasing the production rate.