Application of a real time expert system platform for flexible autonomous transport in industrial production

In a manufacturing environment, material transport plays a key role for the production process efficiency. In Schoeller-Bregenz (SB), a textile manufa cturing SME, induction wire guided vehicles performed typical material tran sports, without the flexibility to adapt transport routes to changes in the production process. To overcome these deficits in the RETRARO project (8) an Autonomous Guided Vehicle (AGV) was designed and tested in the productio n plant. To adapt to changing production configurations, RETRARO had to pro vide solutions for the following functionality regarding economical constra ints: algorithms for efficient path planning and health monitoring; economi c sensor systems to provide navigation and obstacle avoidance functions; In tegration of free navigation capabilities with existing wire guidance syste ms. This paper presents a survey on the AGV system design and details on th e implementation of the control system based on: the real time expert syste m REAKT for path planning and health monitoring; a low cost ultra sonic ran ge detection system using sensor data fusion for navigation and obstacle av oidance. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.