Denso, a Japanese company, has facilities around the world.

In Maryville, Tennessee, one of its facilities operates a sorting warehouse for its products.

Recently, as part of its expansion strategy, much of the racking has been converted to automated transport rather than manual, and three-way AGVs have been purchased.

These vehicles travel very quickly along the warehouse aisles but are also capable of exiting one aisle and moving to another.

In support of these four large A8 trilateral AGVs, there are five smaller A4 AGVs that transport pallets from the entry stations to the front of the warehouse aisles and vice versa, from the warehouse aisle exit stations to the shipping stations or other warehouse areas.

The AGVs have lead-acid batteries that are charged in a charging station, and the A4s exchange batteries with each other and with the A8s.

An AGV (A4 or A8) goes to the battery swap station, an A4 picks up its battery, places it in the charging station, takes a charged battery, and deposits it in the AGV that requested a battery swap.

When the A8 trilateral AGV travels in the aisle, it uses buried magnetic wire navigation, plus contour navigation via reflectors placed at the base of the racks.

When traveling outside the aisles, when passing from one aisle to another, or when traveling to the battery swap station, it uses laser navigation.

The A4 pallets always use laser navigation.

The pallet flow is very high, and great attention has been paid to the precision of storage and retrieval to ensure standard and repeatable operations, with 15 different pallet profiles.

Various automatic calibration procedures, for both the A4 and A8 pallets, also contributed to the precision and repeatability of operations.

Host computer is SAP that handle the warehouse map.

Testing has been a crucial part of the commissioining, focusing on safety and automatic error recovery to reduce as much as possible human intervenction.

AGV navigation type: Laser for the A4 AGVs and Laser + wire guidance and contour for the A8 AGVs.

AGV system controller: a server provided by the customer, where our system and SQL server have been installed. Communication with the host is via TCP/IP, communication with signals is via Modbus, communication with the AGVs is via WiFi.

Charging concept: lead acid batteries that are automatically swapped when low.

This AGV system is working over three shifts.

Number of AGVs: 5 A4 + 4 A8

AGV manufacturer: AGVE

Function: AGV navigation software and commissioning onsite

Year: 2024