Guidance Control Scheme Employing Knowledge-Base for AGV Navigation

Abstract

This paper presents a feed forward control scheme for AGV guidance employing a knowledge-base. The function of this control scheme is to identify the geometric nature of the track and guide the vehicle accordingly. In addition to this, guidance is carried out based on the requirement of positioning the AGV relative to the track profile, i.e. desired values of the position and orientation offsets of the longitudinal axis of the vehicle relative to the track are established. Hence this guidance control scheme provides flexibility in terms of specifying which part of the AGV body has to follow the track. Since vehicle guidance is based on the feedback information from the sensors over a period of time, accurate track following of a larger segment of the track is achieved. Mathematical formulations are presented to identify the track geometry and to compute the desired values of the position and orientation offsets using the sensor data and a mathematical description of the vehicle geometry.