Mission design for a group of autonomous guided vehicles

In this paper a generic approach for the integration of vehicle routing and scheduling and motion planning for a group of autonomous guided vehicles (AGVs) is proposed The AGVs are requested to serve all the work stations in a two-dimensional environment while taking into account kinematics constraints and the environment s geometry during their motion The problem objective is the simultaneous determination of time-optimum and collision-free paths for all AGVs The proposed method is investigated and discussed through a number of simulated experiments using a variety of environments and different initial conditions (C) 2010 Elsevier B V All rights reserved