Equipment Report: Future-proofing AGVs

For decades, automatic guided vehicles (AGVs) have been a method of automating repetitive tasks by loading AGVs or AGV tow tractor carts with materials and sending them down a predetermined path outlined throughout a facility. This design can offer an operation cost savings by lowering the need for manual labor and minimizing potential human error.

In recent years, with upgraded navigation possibilities and their ability to work at height, AGVs have emerged as a more flexible tool in industrial environments, expanding their use outside of traditional manufacturing plants.

AGVs are considered a proven technology that establishes safe and reliable material transport routes. But AGV suppliers aren’t just resting on those traditional strengths: They are adding new means of navigation technology and other features to keep up with the evolution of mobile automation toward greater flexibility.

“We’ve seen a clear shift away from highly bespoke, single-purpose AGVs toward more flexible, modular platforms,” says Nathan Lee, materials handling and logistics director, North America, at Scott Automation. “Operations are no longer looking to solve just one narrow challenge; they want systems that can adapt as business needs evolve. Additionally, we’re seeing greater integration with MHL ecosystems—AGVs are no longer stand-alone machines, but part of a fully automated solution.”

The term AGV is often used synonymously with autonomous mobile robots (AMR), however AGVs are a different option for the daily movement of goods. While AMRs can be more flexible in a more dynamic environment because they can offer obstacle avoidance and task interleaving capabilities, these advanced capabilities are not always needed. AGVs shine for repetitive, low-value tasks.

“The distinction has blurred. In practice, the terms are converging, and what matters more is matching the technology to the application,” Lee adds. “The industry should probably focus less on the label and more on the spectrum of navigation, payload and safety features that best fit each customer’s environment.”

AMRs enter the warehouse

AMR technology has worked its way into many facilities, providing a similar use case to AGVs, except they typically require a less rigid infrastructure and can autonomously avoid obstacles and adjust to different tasks.

AGVs and AMRs compete for the same business in many cases. The smaller applications such as carrying totes are better suited for an AMR, while larger and heavier loads are better suited for AGVs, says Bruce Busher, vice president of Daifuku Airport America Corp.

“Today, many customers use one term for everything. They will call an AGV an AMR and vice versa. Many customers will call an AMR and AGV a mobile robot. Even the MHI organization uses the neutral acronym MAG [Mobile Automation Group] for its AGV and AMR members because of all the similarities,” says Busher. “The bigger picture is: What is required to survive the changes in the market? I believe, a combination of product, support structure, installed base, customer training, spare parts, simplicity of use and how to integrate with other automation will be the key for all AGV and AMR companies to survive and grow.”

However, today’s AGVs can somewhat replicate AMR flexibility through more additions to what they can handle.

“The most exciting innovations are not always about speed or lift capacity, but about adaptability. Modular AGV architectures, like the Nexbot we launched in Chicago at Pack Expo this year, allow businesses to reconfigure vehicles for different roles without replacing the entire fleet and are also reducing infrastructure requirements and speeding up deployments,” Lee says. “On the software side, fleet management and traffic control have become far more sophisticated, enabling dozens or even hundreds of vehicles to operate, recharge and work together efficiently.”

AGVs can now use navigation technology like SLAM (simultaneous location and mapping), which enable them to build a map of the environment and determine its own location within that map, and LiDAR (light detecting and ranging), which uses a series of lasers and GPS scanner that helps a vehicle detect the environment ahead of it and operate accordingly.

“With SLAM technology, you’re essentially learning and predicting and understanding where potential obstacles are and where preferred travel paths are established,” says Steve Fechtmeister, senior director of solution design at FORTNA. “In the past, AGVs really couldn’t do that. They were just as smart as the point-to-point directions they were fed. Now with things like SLAM technology, they can use that information in the future to predict better travel paths between locations, and understand where there may be potential obstacles within their path.”

Some of the SLAM applications that are currently available for AGVs allow for operations to program the routes the vehicles travel along without the need for the traditional magnetic strips AGVs historically worked with.

“It’s really easy to deploy,” says Odo Weiermueller, senior sales consultant for AMRs at Swisslog. “You can do it within a couple of days. You create the maps and draw the paths of PND stations, and you also easily can change it. That was never the case with traditional AGVs.”

AMRs are allowed to deviate from their guide path, which can be great for productivity, according to Chase Turkstra, account manager for mobile automation at Dematic. “For an AMR, when you’re moving an 8,000-pound piece of machinery and you have to drive around a warehouse day after day after day, there would be some safety concerns if you start deviating around a pallet on the floor and driving 6 feet over where you have never driven before.”

AGV trends

One of the historic advantages AGVs have had is their ability to work at height, but even that gap is closing. AGVs can easily be equipped with the same equipment as manually operated lift trucks. Automating lifting tasks can make for a much safer and more efficient facility without the need for human labor.

“Several of the AGV suppliers including Daifuku are implementing some of key functions that AMRs have over AGVs such as obstacle avoidance. Applications such as trailer loading is becoming more popular now because the cost of entry has come down,” says Busher. “There are still only a handful of companies that have actually done successful trailer loading applications with AGVs, so customers need to do their research in this area.”

AGVs have historically been better equipped to handle the responsibilities seen from lifts like turret trucks, which can thrive in narrow, one-way storage environments if operations choose to automate.

“When an AMR can operate like a turret truck AGV loading into a pick module, or can do the application of a reach truck, then I can take a pallet from a dock, I can maneuver down an aisle and I can move onto a pallet rack that’s maybe 15 to 20 feet in the air,” Fechtmeister says. “When an AMR can do that, and it can do it more competitively priced than an AGV, I think AGVs are going to have a very tough time competing overall with AMRs.”

AGVs are also finding a niche being able to work indoors and outdoors. With the right modifications and infrastructure, they can become hybrid environment machines, seamlessly going between both with ease. That ability is becoming a desired feature for some customers looking to add automation to their operations.

“Another trend we do see is that customers are looking for more out of the AGVs themselves,” says Turkstra. “We’re seeing more outdoor applications come up in the general areas we’re used to, like manufacturing or warehousing. It requires different sensors. It’s different safety requirements. There’s a lot of environmental factors.”

Automatic vehicle market

The AGV market is growing with some applications such as forked AGVs growing faster than forked AMRs, Busher says.

“The biggest reason I believe is that AGVs are known to handle larger and heavier loads than an AMR can handle,” Busher says. “For custom type applications, AGV companies usually are willing and able to modify or customize their AGV to fit the application, where AMR companies typically avoid changing their product to fit a special niche.”

As the gaps between the two equipment types closes, application will start to lead the way. Commonly, AGVs and AMRs are grouped together into one generalized term, leaving interested parties with the task of figuring out the difference on their own.

“We don’t distinguish between AGVs and AMRs anymore, because so many customers, vendors and internal colleagues just confuse it in the end,” Weiermueller says. “It’s hard to say where to draw a line in the sand. Where’s the border between the two?”

AGVs can make an impact in fully automated wings of facilities, where human workers do not have to be near or interact with any of the machinery. One of the biggest advantages of AGVs is that they can run 24/7 without the need for any additional labor, and their predictability increases safety throughout a facility.

“For many industries such as food processing, warehousing and automotive, AGVs have crossed the line from nice-to-have to mission-critical. Supply chains today operate with such tight margins and service level expectations that manual processes often can’t keep up. The pandemic highlighted this, but the momentum has continued. Companies that want to remain competitive increasingly see AGVs as key infrastructure, much alongside end-of-line palletizing solutions,” Lee says.

A way for AGVs to run continuously is to incorporate opportunity charging stations throughout a facility, so that when a robot is not in the middle of a task, it can spend time recharging before returning to work. The best battery style for this application is lithium-ion due to its longer service life.

In theory, AGVs can be a crucial component of “lights out” facilities in the future, where everything is fully automated to the point where lights aren’t even necessary, since only automation works there. While the cost of entry for a concept like that is very high, there are many ways for operations to see a faster than expected return on investment with AGVs.

“Training, fork truck rentals and maintenance [can be eliminated costs],” Turkstra says. “Damage is a big one, even late paying for trucks sitting on the dock because they’re waiting to fill a trailer. AGVs are not the fastest, but they’re consistent and they run 24/7… and with the right maintenance plan in place and preventative maintenance, it’s very common to have all the vehicles running.”

But to reach this point, operations will need to focus on application.

“I think AGVs were used in the past when it was clearly given a very good use case in terms of low to medium throughput,” Weiermueller says. “For instance, we have long transport distances repeating, but not too much so that we get into a congestion situation. With the AMR right now, we can drive a little bit more narrow.”

While technology will only progress so much at any given time, AGVs can remain an important part of operations going forward with better understanding of their uses.

“Everybody thinks it’s a big jump and that every year the technology is changing,” Turkstra says. “No one in the industry has had a big jump. There’s been lots of small steps, but for end customers, understanding their process and understanding their movements is the biggest thing they need to understand before they come and ask for an AGV project.”

Adds Lee: “What we’re really seeing is automation being positioned as a strategic future-proofing tool, not just a cost-saving measure.” 

Many autonomous lift trucks in use today are based on AGV technology. AGV lift trucks can lift pallet loads to high rack positions, but will generally stop when they sense an obstacle in their path, rather than dynamically going around the obstacle or debris.

AGV tow tractors and carts excel at use cases such as line-side delivery of parts to assembly lines or production cells, transport of empty pallets back to a staging point, or delivery or corrugate or packing materials to point of use.

Autonomous tuggers bring productivity, worker opportunities to U.S. Continental

With a 100,000-square-foot factory, U.S. Continental is a leading private label leather and fabric care company. U.S. Continental has become the trusted partner for leading franchise brands seeking top-tier commercial packaging and private label care product services.

The company has seen tremendous growth over the three decades it’s been in business. And, it has become familiar with the hurdles intrinsic to manufacturing: supply chain disruptions, soaring labor costs and the relentless pursuit of streamlined operations and heightened productivity.

The company deployed a fully autonomous tugger train to automate repetitive hauling, with robust and reliable self-driving tuggers. And, after a brief integration period, an autonomous DriveMod tugger (Cyngn) began transporting pallets around the Corona, Calif., facility, doing supply runs between two buildings.

Over several months of operation, the self-driving vehicle enhanced operational speed, fostered organizational precision and delivered substantial labor savings.

Previously, a substantial human effort of 200 trips per week was required to fulfill pallet delivery between the two buildings. However, after the introduction of an autonomous vehicle, this workload has been seamlessly absorbed.

The vehicles surpass traditional manual labor, as they can transport four pallets in a single trip, as opposed to one pallet at a time that can be accomplished with a forklift. This not only multiplies efficiency, but also allows for labor to be reallocated to other more valuable tasks, such as order picking and pulling.

Beyond operational enhancements, the integration of autonomous vehicles has sparked positive developments in the workforce. Opportunities for employee growth within the company have emerged, leading to promotions and role reallocations. Employees are now empowered to take on different responsibilities, contributing to a more versatile and skilled workforce.

“U.S. Continental conducts manufacturing operations leveraging two separate, but adjacent facilities. Before deploying the Cyngn autonomous vehicles, we moved pallets of materials one at a time across the parking lot using standard forklift trucks. Now, we move four pallets at a time and do not tie up our staff transporting materials around the property,” says Dave Hoover, U.S Continental’s vice president of technical services. “The production team receives staged materials more efficiently and our warehousing team is free to address more value-add processes, such as cycle counting, order pulling and receiving/put-away. The program has also resulted in the opportunity to promote staff to new and more challenging positions.”

Teams working directly with the autonomous robot revised their workflows to better align with the vehicle’s predictable schedule. This simple change made a big difference—reducing variability, boosting overall efficiency, and making it easier to train new employees.

“The additional capacity to move materials from location to location has reduced maintenance costs on our lifts. Every trip the autonomous vehicles make eliminates three additional trips for our forklifts,” says Lockand Corley, vice president of operations. “Our facility transfers raw materials from one warehouse to a second production warehouse, approximately 75 yards one way. Not having to run our forklifts outdoors across the bumpy parking lot has reduced routine wear and tear of our forklifts.”