An Autonomous Transport Vehicle in an existing manufacturing facility with focus on the docking maneuver task

The aim of this paper is to present a low-cost Autonomous Transport Vehicle (ATV) for the transportation of material in an existing manufacturing facility. To avoid high costs of layouts and structural modifications, the ATV has to function with minimal changes to the factory. An important part of the transportation process is the docking maneuver: the action of picking up material containers from the storage areas known as supermarkets. This paper proposes three different solutions based on low-cost sensors for this docking maneuver task. First, a line-following method is introduced. To avoid the utilization of markers, the remaining solutions depend exclusively on objects available in the supermarkets. For the second approach, the common blue boxes for carrying materials are used. Third, the rails where material boxes are collected on rollers are utilized for a novel docking guidance approach. Accuracy tests of the three methods proposed expose the possibilities and limitations concerning the range of application. The box detection approach is unsuitable for current supermarkets because of its inaccuracy over larger distances. The line-following approach provides good accuracy, but requires changes to the existing supermarkets. Finally, if global localization provides the correct initial pose, the rail detection has demonstrated an accuracy similar to the line detection approach without the need of additional markers.