: Merklinger, A.

Abstract
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.