Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems (제어로봇시스템학회논문지)

Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems (제어로봇시스템학회)
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Development of Autonomous Loading and Unloading for Network-based Unmanned Forklift

네트워크 기반 무인지게차를 위한 팔레트 자율적재기술의 개발

  • 박지훈 (부산대학교 기계공학부) ;
  • 김민환 (부산대학교 컴퓨터공학부) ;
  • 이석 (부산대학교 기계공학부) ;
  • 이경창 (부경대학교 제어계측공학과)
  • Received : 2011.05.25
  • Accepted : 2011.07.27
  • Published : 2011.10.01
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Abstract

Unmanned autonomous forklifts have a great potential to enhance the productivity of material handling in various applications because these forklifts can pick up and deliver loads without an operator and any fixed guide. Especially, automation of pallet loading and unloading technique is useful for enhancing performance of logistics and reducing cost for automation system. There are, however, many technical difficulties in developing such forklifts including localization, map building, sensor fusion, control, and so on. This is because the system requires numerous sensors, actuators, and controllers that need to be connected with each other, and the number of connections grows very rapidly as the number of devices grows. This paper presents a vision sensorbased autonomous loading and unloading for network-based unmanned forklift where system components are connected to a shared CAN network. Functions such as image processing and control algorithm are divided into small tasks that are distributed over a number of microcontrollers with a limited computing capacity. And the experimental results show that proposed architecture can be an appropriate choice for autonomous loading in the unmanned forklift.

Keywords

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