Coordinating the motion of multiple AGVs in automatic warehouses

In this paper an algorithm for planning a coordinated motion of a fleet of Autonomous Guided Vehicles (AGVs) delivering goods in an automatic warehouse is proposed. The AGVs travel along a common segmented layout and a path is assigned to each robot by a mission planner. Coordination diagrams are used for representing possible collisions among the robots and a novel algorithm for efficiently determining a coordinated motion of the fleet is proposed. The coordination approach proposed in the paper is validated through experiments on real plants layouts. We present an example in which the coordinated motion of 10 vehicles is computed in only 12.4 sec. on a common PC.