No More Sweat or Tears

This article focuses on the fact that automated guided vehicles are making inroads on safety and the bottom line. More sense prevails in the controlled environment of a U.S. Postal Service processing facility in Fort Myers. There, at least, pedestrians are granted their rightful way. The heavily automated facility is a test case for the post office’s experiment in integrated mail processing. The automated guided vehicles (AGV) move pallets and wheeled containers between the sorting equipment and the loading dock. For the Fort Myers AGV project, personnel installed a grid of reflectors in the building. The vehicles, bouncing laser light off these reflectors, triangulate their x-y coordinates and their headings. A confidence factor helps the vehicle place either more faith or less in its knowing where it is, thereby accounting, say, for variations in a scan off a dirty reflector.