Research And Development Of The Drive Unit For The Affordable Modularization Magnetic Guided AGV

Through years of research and development, the key technology of AGVs has made a bigbreakthrough. But the application of AGV at home or abroad situation was still only in the automotive,tobacco and other profitable industries. The main reason lies in the high cost, long development cycleof the AGV. Many companies can’t put the AGV into use, because the high cost, although the demandof AGV in various domestic industries was great.A kind of affordable drive unit of automated guided vehicle was designed, in order to promotethe application of AGV. The guidance and drive system were made modularization by this AGV driveunit. By using this drive unit, just need to design the body of AGV, then an AGV will be designedquickly. The AGV drive unit was designed with the magnetic guidance, although the positioningprecision can’t be as high as laser guidance, but with the correct control method and auxiliarypositioning mechanism, this unit can meet the application requirements in material conveying. At thesame time this drive unit greatly saved the cost of AGV for the enterprise. Then based on the analysisof AGV motion characteristics, and combined with the theory of fuzzy controller, this paper putsforward a control algorithm which can be used for the AGV driving unit developed in this paper, thecontrol algorithm based on the magnetic guidance. At last the embedded control system based ofARM7for AGV was developed successfully. In order to test the driving unit, control algorithm andcontrol system, one AGV which used this driving unit was developed, and a number of experimentswere carried out. All the schemes designed by this paper were proved to be right by these experiments.Finally, this paper summarized all the research work and achievements, and put forward theprospects based on the experimental experience.