Design and Development of Automated Guided Vehicles for Active Learning in Material Handling Management for Smart Manufacturing Operation

Automated guided vehicles (AGVs) have become a preferred material handling system commonly seen for logistics in a manufacturing facility in the modern days when flexibility is critical in smart manufacturing for offering a variety of low volume products to serve individual demands. Accessibility to AGVs, however, is very limited in school due to their commercially high costs, complexity, and restrictions imposed by the manufacturers in alterations. This paper presents the design and development of a fleet of in-house AGVs to support the active learning of students with hands-on experience in the material handling management in smart manufacturing. The AGVs were designed and built in a modular manner with open-source, off the shelf parts that can be swapped, altered, and changed as necessary to allow access to almost all aspects of the AGV, such as access to inertial measurements of bearing, velocity and acceleration, motor readings of speed and power consumption, live camera feed for image processing, various proximity readings, magnetic line following output and many more features in order to give sufficient resources for the students to experiment on. They also allow students to execute their algorithms on the AGVs to get hands-on experience in AGV fleet management and navigation.