The success of an AGV is not so much determined by the vehicle, but by the complete solution around it. That is the message that lingers after visiting the Scala AGV during Logistica. The trade fair featured many suppliers of standard AGVs, but a small adjustment in design or control can make that last bit of difference.
The Scala AGV features a yellow vehicle that looks suspiciously like a stacker. The vehicle picks up pallets and drives incessantly around the demonstration square. The manufacturer of this AGV is WEWO. "We design and produce customer-specific solutions," explains WEWO technical director Ard Baan. "These can include AGVs driving under a load carrier, but also AGVs with a fork carriage like that yellow vehicle."
Why have an AGV specially made when you can also make a standard stacker drive autonomously with some technological modifications? "Because ours is a lot shorter. Our AGV has no drawbar or cab like a standard vehicle. This makes it a more compact and manoeuvrable vehicle. Especially in production environments, this is important," explains Baan, who estimates that WEWO has installed some 50 to 60 autonomous driving vehicles at customers. "Among them are some companies where almost all production depends on AGVs."
Fewer errors
The market for AGVs is booming. Companies are interested in AGVs because they are struggling to get staff, because they want to remove unsafe forklifts from the floor or simply because they want to make fewer mistakes. "An AGV does not make mistakes and keeps going continuously," says Baan, who sees competition increasing. The Logistica is full of new suppliers with new models. "But often these are standard AGVs, for which an application is then developed. We take the opposite approach. We look at the application first and then make a vehicle that is tailored exactly to it."
A customised AGV means that WEWO can also tailor the technological choices exactly to customers' needs. The company often uses LIDAR as its navigation technology. This involves mapping the contours of the building once with the AGV. The next time, the AGV recognises the surroundings so that it can determine its own position. "But sometimes we use a line-following system, for example if the AGV only drives the same round. In that case, the AGV follows a line marked on the floor."
Diversions search
Many AGV suppliers promote LIDAR as a navigation technology, arguing that when an obstacle is encountered, the vehicle will look for a diversion on its own. "Our vehicles can do that too, but often we disable that function. If an AGV has to swerve in a production environment, it often encounters another obstacle. It regularly happens that the AGV gets completely stuck that way. Then it is difficult to get it moving again," says Baan.
The fact that a specially designed AGV is more expensive than a standard AGV is not a given, according to Baan. "Suppose a company has a thousand load carriers that cannot be transported by a standard AGV. Then it might be cheaper to design a customer-specific AGV than to modify those thousand load carriers."
Complete solution
On the other side of the Scala AGV is an autonomous vehicle from MoviGo. This company was formed in April 2018 from three companies: a mechatronic engineering firm, a software provider and a logistics consultancy. "Why these three companies? Because we want to develop not just an autonomous vehicle, but a complete solution," says Paul van der Hulst, general manager of MoviGo.
Van der Hulst sees many companies buying an AGV and then having to take care of the integration into their production processes themselves. MoviGo wants to prevent that. "We have paid a lot of attention to the process around the vehicle. How do you create an order? How do you run the vehicle? We have developed an open software system for that. Open, so that companies can also control other AGVs with this software system. If a customer wants to control an autonomous driving reach truck, that is no problem for us. After all, we ourselves do not have such a truck in our product portfolio and do not want one at all."
Intelligent pump truck
MoviGo's AGV can be adapted to the customer's needs. If the forks need to be moved closer together to pick up a dolly on the short side, this is not a problem. "We have now developed an AGV with a length of 2 metres and a width of 1 metre that can lift 2.5 tonnes and drive 1.6 metres per second," says Van der Hulst proudly.
Van der Hulst describes the small variant on the range as an intelligent pump truck. "But one with a battery that lasts nine hours. After three quarters of an hour of charging, it will last another nine hours."
The controls can be adapted to the customer's needs. The latter can opt for operation via a tablet, phone or PC, for example, as well as linking to an ERPor WMS system. "We use vision technology to manage pick-up and drop-off points; a camera sees where a pallet is ready to be moved and where there are empty locations to put a pallet down. The vehicle itself can weigh the load and scan barcodes. We collect a wealth of data, but most companies still do very little with it."
