Thesis (M.Tech.) - Central University of Technology, Free State, 2007 / The latest technological trend worldwide, is automation. Reducing human labour and introducing robots to do the work is a pure business decision. The reason for automating a plant can be some, or all, of the following:
Improve productivity
Reduce labour and equipment costs
Reduce product damage
System reliability can be monitored
Improves plant safety
When the automation process is started, Automatic Guided Vehicles (AGVs) will be one of the first commodities that can be used. The reason for this is that they are so versatile. They can be programmed to follow specific paths when moving material from one point to another and the biggest advantage of all is that they can operate for twenty four hours a day.
Automatic Guided Vehicles are developed for many different applications and therefore many different types of AGVs are available. All AGVs are equipped with sensors so that they are able to “see” what is happening around them. Since the AGV must be able to function without any human help or control, it must be able to navigate through the work environment. In this study a remote control car was converted to an AGV and thorough research was done on the different types of sensors that can be used to make the AGV more intelligent when it comes to navigating in an unknown environment.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:cut/oai:ir.cut.ac.za:11462/83 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Creators | Boje, Ellenor Petronella |
| Contributors | Vermaak, H.J., Central University of Technology, Free State. Faculty of Engineering, Information and Communication Technology. School of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering |
| Publisher | Bloemfontein : Central University of Technology, Free State |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 3 534 521 bytes, application/pdf |
| Rights | Central University of Technology, Free State |
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