Intelligent Path Planning For Automated Guided Vehicles Based On Topological Map

AGV is a wheeled mobile robot that is used to convey materials in FMS. Nowadays, AGV system has become more and more popular in various occasions, e.g. intelligent warehouses, underground mining, submarine and space exploration. In recent years, in order to solve the technical problems which come from different aspects of the AGV system, researchers have conducted in-depth researches in this field.This work introduces the overall structure of the AGV control system first. Then it points out some key technologies while designing the AGV system. The electronic map of the environment is modeled as topological map. The storage method of the electronic map in computer and database is addressed after creating the map. The paper also introduces that how Visual Studio access the SQL server database.In addition, this work presents a novel path planning method. This method uses an improved version of classical Dijkstra’s algorithm as the global path planning algorithm, using the heuristics search algorithm-A*algorithm as the local path planning algorithm. In the multi AGV scenario, to avoid conflict, a few methods were addressed including transportation rules method, unidirectional method, time window method etc..To verify the performance of the suggested algorithms, a lot of simulation and practical running test are carried out for different scenarios. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed path planning method. All the paths searched by this algorithm are optimal, which not only are the shortest and with the minimum turning, but also collision free.