An Efficient Approach for Line-Following Automated Guided Vehicles Based on Fuzzy Inference Mechanism

Recently, there has been increasing attention paid to AGV (Automated Guided Vehicle) in factories and warehouses to enhance the level of automation. In order to improve productivity, it is necessary to increase the efficiency of the AGV, including working speed and accuracy. This study presents a fuzzy-PID controller for improving the efficiency of a line-following AGV. A line-following AGV suffers from tracking errors, especially on curved paths, which causes a delay in the lap time. The fuzzy-PID controller in this study mimics the principle of human vehicle control as the situation-aware speed adjustment on curved paths. Consequently, it is possible to reduce the tracking error of AGV and improve its speed. Experimental results show that the Fuzzy-PID controller outperforms the PID controller in both accuracy and speed, especially the lap time of a line-following AGV is enhanced up to 28.6% with the proposed fuzzy-PID controller compared to that with the PID controller only.