Design and development of an automated guided vehicle for educational purposes

An Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) is a set of cooperative driverless vehicle, used on manufacturing floor and coordinated by a centralized or distributed computer-based control system. AGVs-based Material Handling Systems (MHSs) are widely used in several Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS) installations. One of the challenge in MHSs is how flexible and adequate is the utilization. The key issue of the flexibility of MHSs is the routing system. It should be designed in a way that can be easily modified to become adaptable to new or replaced machines. The main focus of this study is to make an AGV with the convenient materials, simple and applicable routing system and more importantly reducing the cost and increasing the flexibility. For this propose an AGV is basically modeled and designed with CATIA software and developed with special specifications such as producing some parts by milling CNC when high accuracy was necessary. Moreover the flexibility of the system is improved employing three more sensors which make the plan more intelligent dealing with multi directional guiding paths. Also benefiting from the colorful paths the flexible is enormously increased due to simplicity of the nature the paint to be plant or removed. Finally the users are able to extend components, add new machines, define them and specify routs for new settings without disturbing the operations in process. This thesis also addresses key issues involved in the design and operation of AGV-based MHSs for the FMS section of CAD-CAM laboratory of Mechanical Engineering Department of Eastern Mediterranean University.