Consumption Patterns and the Advent of Automated Guided Vehicles, and the Trends for Automated Guided Vehicles

Abstract

In this paper we review how automation and robots are a key player in contributing to the increased need for profit by providing decrease production costs, reducing delivery time, improving quality, and increasing customer satisfaction. In particular, we focus on logistics robots, namely, automated guided vehicles (AGVs) and automated mobile robots (AMRs), generically addressing their applications, state of the art, and trends. We further identify technological trends and implementation challenges. Finally, we discuss how they can influence future implementations of the Factory of the Future and help attaining the goal of implementing all lights out factory. The most typical applications of AGVs are transportation (raw materials from warehouse to production line and finished products back to warehouse), storage (holding or buffering material over a period of time), distribution (fulfillment, cross-dock facility, bulk break, and package handling) and assembly (reduce the line-side storage requirements, enabling just-in-time). AGVs are a complex systems’ engineering product based on integrating many different technologies. We address commonly used technologies for navigation, positioning, and management, among others, and present novel technologies and development trends. The 4 Industrial Revolutions and the ever-increasing consumption demands have been putting pressure on both production plants and logistics chains. With e-commerce surging and tele-work being redefined to new scales, the efficiency and speed of manufacturing and delivery are paramount. Although AGVs are already used in many industries and applications, self-driving and autonomous vehicles still have a bright, untapped future ahead, but with many technical and regulatory challenges to tackle. The market will grow even faster as more technologies are incorporated at lower prices and as it becomes easier to deploy and commission AGVs. On the other hand, the fusion and intelligent cooperation between standard automated vehicles and autonomous self-driving vehicles will open new market segments of increasingly significant importance. We have thus concluded that although AGVs have been gaining traction in the past decade, the democratization of implementing AGVs is far from being around the corner. The integration of AGVs in different manufacturing and logistics processes will skyrocket when installing and deploying an AGV is effortless, and it is likely that speed of adoption of AGVs will benefit and leverage on the increasingly more advanced and more readily available software for autonomous self-driving vehicles.