Performance data of dead reckoning procedure for non guided vehicles

The search for more flexibility in all parts of industrial manufacturing increasingly affects material handling and distribution. For the field of Automatically Guided Vehicles (AGVs) this especially means: - replacement of fixed guidance lines by flexible driving-paths - renounciation of costly installations, - extension of driving püaths also in out door areas, - acceleration of driving speed, - improvement of safety installations and - flexible programming. Efforts of research institutes and manufacturers aspire to develop vehicles without any guidance line, so-called non-guided vehicles. Thereby a special look out is to be drawn to the localization aspect. In most cases this unit is realised by using dead-reckoning systems in combination with various other methods of position detection. Different methods of dead-reckoning localization have been examined at the free ranging AGV IPAMAR of the Fraunhofer Institute IPA. The results are presented hereafter.