AGV (Automated Guided Vehicle), due to its good flexibility and high reliability, can reduce the labor demand in factories and warehouses, and is easy to install and maintain. Therefore, it has been more and more widely used in recent years.
In recent years, as some companies begin to integrate Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) into their operations, understanding their safety systems is crucial. To help maximize efficiency and safety, your employees need to understand these safety systems and how to interact with AGVs. Here, we introduce some of the benefits of AGVs and their safety systems to help you understand how they can help you provide a high level in material handling operations.
AGV intelligent warehouse
The safety system of AGV is an important part to ensure that the automated guided vehicle can avoid collisions and protect the safety of operators and equipment during operation. Its working principle and key technical points mainly include the following:
- Obstacle detection technology
Multi-sensor fusion technology such as lidar, ultrasonic sensor, infrared sensor, and camera is usually adopted. These sensors continuously scan the environment around the AGV and collect distance and object information. For example, lidar measures the distance to surrounding obstacles by emitting laser pulses and receiving the reflected signals; ultrasonic sensors emit ultrasonic waves and receive echoes to determine the position of obstacles.
- Emergency stop mechanism
Once an emergency is detected, such as when an obstacle is too close or there is a sudden manual intervention, the safety system of the AGV will immediately trigger an emergency braking program and stop the vehicle quickly and smoothly to avoid a collision. This usually involves a dual guarantee of hardware and software to ensure a fast and reliable response.
- Area protection and obstacle avoidance strategy
By presetting safety areas and defining different obstacle avoidance strategies, the AGV can flexibly adjust its behavior according to the operating environment. For example, when approaching sidewalks or high-density operation areas, the AGV will reduce speed or take more conservative obstacle avoidance actions.
- Visual recognition and deep learning
Modern AGV safety systems may also integrate advanced visual recognition technology. Cameras are used to capture images, and deep learning algorithms are used to analyze object categories, sizes, movement directions, etc. in the images to improve the understanding ability of complex environments and make more intelligent avoidance decisions.
- Sound and light alarm system
When performing emergency braking or other safety operations, the AGV will also activate sound and light alarms to remind surrounding staff to pay attention to avoidance and increase the safety of the operation site.
- Interlock and communication protocol
In the scenario of multi-AGV collaborative operation, each vehicle exchanges position and status information in real time through wireless communication technologies (such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or proprietary wireless networks) to achieve operation coordination and interlocking and prevent mutual collisions.
In the intelligent era, intelligent machinery and equipment that replaces simple, mechanical, repetitive and heavy physical work has become the trend of future development. This trend can not only improve work efficiency and quality, but also liberate human resources so that they can be better applied to creative and advanced intelligent tasks.
Undoubtedly, the efficiency improvement brought by the AGV trolley after it is put into use is obvious. By replacing manpower with equipment, accidents such as vehicle injuries and crushing injuries caused by forklifts can also be reduced to a certain extent. After all, it reduces the frequency of personnel being exposed to dangerous environments.
