Rapid Determination of Transportation Line Layout by Combination of AGV's Line Searching and Conveyor's Neighbor Recognition

Consumer needs are becoming more diverse, and retail e-commerce sales globally continue to grow. Thus, due in part to the aging population, there is a shortage of people to carry out the physical works in warehouses and factories. Hence, logistics is a field where the demand for the automation of work is increasing. However, situations of logistics business become more liable to change recently, and it becomes hard to introduce conventional automation systems. Therefore, in previous research, we proposed a transportation system that can automatically deal with the change of the material handling modules’ relative configuration in a single transportation line in accordance with a change of the logistics flow. This system consists of autonomous material handling modules such as conveyors, autonomous guided vehicles (AGVs), and manipulators to reduce the work-hours required for on-site construction or layout change. In this paper, we focus on how the system determines the layout of multiple transportation lines so that AGVs can transport goods from one line to another. There are two simple ways to realize this determination. One is to measure the layout by hand and input the data into the system, and the other is to have the AGVs explorer and check every conveyor. However, these ways would take much time. Therefore, we developed a method for the system to rapidly understand the lines’ layout using combinations of AGV’s line searching and conveyor’s neighbor recognition. In a verification experiment, we constructed two separate conveyor lines in an 8m×8m area in a physical simulation and ran the AGV. As a result, the system acquired the transportation line layout in 45 seconds, and we confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed method.