A Study of AGV Collaboration with Internet of Things Concept for Collision Avoidance at Warehouse Intersection

With advance of technology, automated guided vehicle (AGV) will become common daily vehicles, which means collaboration between AGVs are more and more important. This paper suggests that how to make AGV avoid collisions with other AGVs is a practical problem, and it is a common need and should be solved if there are two or more AGVs interacting with others. Therefore, a better system design should be developed and implemented. This paper used a three-layer structure of internet of things (IoT) to design an AGV collaboration system, to avoid collisions with other AGVs in this system, and to decrease path deviation. The concept of IoT was applied for AGV communicating with other AGVs through sending AGV position messages. In such a case, AGV would know other AGV positions and decide which actions to take. This paper used Robot Operating System (ROS) to design an AGV collaboration system, and conducted an experiment to verify the feasibility of this system. The experiment simulated the intersection of warehouse in the real world. According to the results, two AGVs can avoid collisions by knowing positions of each other in every path scenario. When two AGV both followed straight paths, the deviation was the smallest. When one AGV turned left and another turned right, it might have largest deviation.