An automatic approach for the generation of the roadmap for multi-AGV systems in an industrial environment

This paper deals with the automatic generation of a roadmap. We propose an approach to build a roadmap for Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) used for logistics operations in industrial environments. The algorithm computes a roadmap in such a way that the coverage, the connectivity and the redundancy of the paths are maximized. In this way the flexibility and the efficiency of the AGV system can be increased. The proposed approach is validated by means of comparison with different roadmaps manually built in real plants.

I. Introduction

This paper deals with the automatic generation of a roadmap for the navigation of Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) in an automatic warehouse. As illustrated in [1], [2], in the vast majority of modern automatic warehouses, AGVs are constrained to move along a set of (virtual) paths and this set is usually called roadmap. Up to sixty AGVs can travel in an automatic warehouse and the way the roadmap is designed tremendously affects the way traffic can be managed and, consequently, the efficiency of the overall system. In the current industrial practice, given the layout of a plant, the roadmap is manually designed. This process is very time consuming and the achieved set of paths can be quite far from the best one. Thus, we propose an automatic procedure for designing a roadmap which dramatically decreases the installation time and the cost of an AGV system.