A Pedestrian Dynamics Based Approach to Autonomous Movement Control of Automatic Guided Vehicles

Automatic guided vehicles (AGVs) are a prospective concept for optimizing transportation capacity and reducing the costs of material transport and handling in manufacturing systems. Besides the careful allocation of individual transportation tasks, single units have to be able to freely move in a given two-dimensional space possibly restricted by a set of fixed or variable obstacles in order to use their full potentials. One particular possibility for realizing an autonomous movement control is utilizing self-organization concepts from pedestrian dynamics like the social force model. Since this model itself does not explicitly prohibit possible collisions, this contribution discusses necessary modifications such as the implementation of braking strategies and approaches for anticipating deadlock situations, which need to be additionally considered for developing a generally applicable autonomous movement control. By means of numerical simulations, different operational situations are investigated in a generic scenario in order to identify the practical limitations of our approach. The presented work suggests considerable potentials of pedestrian dynamics-based self-organization principles for establishing a flexible and robust movement control for AGVs, which shall be further studied in future work.

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