• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
• /
• v.19 no.3
• /
• pp.539-547
• /
• 2016

Automated guided vehicles (AGVs) are widely used in industry. Several types of vision-based AGVs have been studied in order to reduce cost of infrastructure building at floor of workspace and to increase flexibility of changing the navigation path layout. A practical vision-based guideline tracing method is proposed in this paper. A virtual tracing wheel is introduced and adopted in this method, which enables a vision-based AGV to trace a guideline in diverse ways. This method is also useful for preventing damage of the guideline by enforcing the real steering wheel of the AGV not to move on the guideline. Usefulness of the virtual tracing wheel is analyzed through computer simulations. Several navigation tests with a commercial AGV were also performed on a usual guideline layout and we confirmed that the virtual tracing wheel based tracing method could work practically well.

• Proceedings of the Korea Multimedia Society Conference
• /
• 2012.05a
• /
• pp.267-267
• /
• 2012

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
• /
• v.15 no.11
• /
• pp.1319-1329
• /
• 2012

AGVs are more and more utilized nowadays and magnetic guided AGVs are most widely used because their system has low cost and high speed. But this type of AGVs requires high infrastructure building cost and has poor flexibility of navigation path layout changing. Thus it is hard to applying this type of AGVs to a small quantity batch production system or a cooperative production system with many AGVs. In this paper, we propose a vision based guideline interpretation technique that uses the cheap, easily installable and changeable color tapes (or paint) as a guideline. So a vision-based AGV with color tapes is effectively applicable to the production systems. For easy setting and changing of AGV navigation path, we suggest an automatic method for interpreting a complex guideline layout including multi-branches and joins of branches. We also suggest a trace direction decision method for stable navigation of AGVs. Through several real-time navigation tests with an industrial AGV installed with the suggested technique, we confirmed that the technique is practically and stably applicable to real industrial field.