UWB-Based Safety System for Autonomous Guided Vehicles Without Hardware on the Infrastructure

Abstract

Automated Guided Vehicles (AGV) are unmanned transport vehicles widely used in the industrial sector to substitute manned industrial trucks and conveyors. In order to guarantee safe operation, AGVs must be equipped with a safety system to stop their movement in presence of obstacles or humans in their path. This work presents a novel safety system for AGVs that is based on Ultra Wideband (UWB) technology. Unlike previous works based on UWB Real-Time Location Systems (RTLS), the proposed safety system does not require installing hardware on the plant’s infrastructure. Instead, the AGV is equipped with sensors capable of locating the tag of a person or a mobile asset. This simplifies deployment of the solution and enables its use in dynamic environments. The proposed safety system was mounted in an AGV designed by the company ASTI Mobile Robotics. Dynamic measurements showed that the proposed safety system accurately mirrors the relative movement between the AGV and tag. Furthermore, the proposed safety system employs a novel method for post-processing ranging data. Measurements showed that this method improves the accuracy of the system, resulting in a more homogeneously distributed positioning error around a room.

Keywords

• Autonomous vehicle
• automated guided vehicle (AGV)
• indoor navigation
• real-time location system (RTLS)
• robot sensing system
• ultra-wideband (UWB) technology