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Abstract:
AGV stands for AUTOMATED GUIDED VEHICLE. It is an autonomous robotic vehicle which
can move over the industry shop floor without any manual aid. The vehicle has sensors mounted
on it which help the vehicle to traverse its path from one work station to another. The sensors not
only help the vehicle to traverse the path but also help the vehicle to halt at a particular
workstation for required job processing time.
The sensors are mounted below AGV which detect the presence of path printed on industry shop
floor. The output of sensors it fed to microcontroller which processes the data and signal the
drive train to actuate accordingly.
This reduces the material handling time and errors involved in material handling, making
material handling more mistake proof. This in turn increases the efficiency of production system
and thus reduces the cost of production.
Introduction
Material handling is the most important process in converting raw material into finished product.
As the demand increases it becomes more and more tedious to transfer material efficiently from
one work station to another
As human behavior is prone to error making there is need for an autonomous system which can
transfer material from one workstation to another without delay and errors. This can be achieved
by using an AGV for moving material from one work station to another.
AGV stands for automated guided vehicle. As the name suggests it is fully autonomous, on chip
computer guided vehicle with zero manual intervention. In other words AGV is an autonomous
robotic vehicle which can trace the path printed on industry shop floor and navigate along the
path from one workstation to another. It works just like a robot as it is able to sense and response
to the environment.
The aim of this project is to build a prototype of an Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) model
that can move on a flat surface. The prototype is able to follow line on floor with the
microcontroller as it main brain that control all the navigation and responses to the environment.
The ability to follow line on floor is an advantage of this prototype as it can be further developed
to do more complicated task in real life. To follow the line, the microcontroller is attached to a
sensor that continuously reflecting to the surface condition. Therefore, this project involves of
designing and fabrication of the hardware and circuitry.
Objective:
The main objective of the project is to design and fabricate the prototype of Automated
guided vehicle also called as AGV which can traverse the industry path without the
intervention of human control.
To demonstrate to use of robotic arm to unload the material at the work station. When the
AGV approaches the workstation, the robotic arm present at the workstation quickly
unloads the material at the workstation.
To add a safety feature to AGV, this automatically stops the AGV when there is an object
of human on the path of AGV.
Research Methodology:
This project involves design and fabrication of prototype of AGV. This project is divided into
different modules for the simplicity of achieving the tasks associated with AGV. The AGV is
fully functional with the help of these three major components:
1) Sensor Array
2) Microcontroller board
3) Drive train
4) Robot Arm at work Station
5) Collision detection for safety
1) SENSOR ARRAYS
A sensor is defined as a device that measures a physical quantity and converts it into a
signal which can be read by an observer or by an instrument. The task of the sensor here
is to follow the line on industry shop floor. This can be done with the help of reflectance
sensors. The sensors used in this project will be infrared tx-rx sensors.
This sensor consists of an infrared transmitter which emits infrared rays. These rays hit
the ground. If the black line is below the sensor then entire radiation will be absorbed by
the line and no radiation will be sensed at the receivers end. This will give the sensor
output as low.
If there is no line i.e. white surface (industry shop floor) the entire radiation will be
reflected and sensor output will be high.
This output is fed to the microcontroller which processes the output of sensor and signals
the drive train accordingly.
2) MICROCONTROLLER BOARD:
The microcontroller proposed to be used here is ATMELS AVR ATMEGA 328
MICROCONTROLLER with arduino firmware. A microcontroller (sometimes
abbreviated C, uC or MCU) is a small computer on a single integrated circuit
containing a processor core, memory, and programmable input/output peripherals.
Program memory in the form of NOR flash or OTP ROM is also often included on chip,
as well as a typically small amount of RAM. Microcontrollers are designed for embedded
applications, in contrast to the microprocessors used in personal computers or other
general purpose applications.
The high-performance Atmel 8-bit AVR RISC-based microcontroller combines 32KB
ISP flash memory with read-while-write capabilities, 1KB EEPROM, 2KB SRAM, 23
general purpose I/O lines, 32 general purpose working registers, three flexible
timer/counters with compare modes, internal and external interrupts,serial programmable
USART, a byte-oriented 2-wire serial interface, SPI serial port, 6-channel 10-bit A/D
converter (8-channels in TQFP and QFN/MLF packages), programmable watchdog timer
with internal oscillator, and five software selectable power saving modes. The device
operates between 1.8-5.5 volts.
By executing powerful instructions in a single clock cycle, the device achieves
throughputs approaching 1 MIPS per MHz, balancing power consumption and processing
speed.
The output of sensor is fed to this microcontroller. The drive train is connected to the
other end of microcontroller. The microcontroller processes the output of IR sensors and
then signal the drive train to carry out the particular task i.e. line following.
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References
1)
2)
3)
4)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_guided_vehicle
Beginning Arduino by Michael McRoberts
Robotics with AVR by Toshendra Sharma
Robotics: Modelling planning and control by
Villani
5) AGVS at work by Gray Hammond.
Luigi