Search Results (9)

Efficient navigation of Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) in dynamic warehouse environments requires real-time and accurate path segmentation algorithms. However, traditional semantic segmentation models suffer from excessive parameters and high computational costs, limiting their deployment on resource-constrained embedded platforms. A lightweight image segmentation algorithm is proposed, built on an improved ESPNet-C architecture, combining Spatial Group-wise Enhance (SGE) and Efficient Channel Attention (ECA) with a dual-branch upsampling decoder. On our custom warehouse dataset, the model attains 90.5% Miou with 0.425 M parameters and runs at ~160 FPS, reducing parameters by ×116–×136 and computational costs by 70–92% in comparison with DeepLabV3+. The proposed model improves boundary coherence by 22% under uneven lighting and achieves 90.2% Miou on the public BDD100K benchmark, demonstrating strong generalization beyond warehouse data. These results highlight its suitability as a real-time visual perception module for AGV navigation in resource-constrained environments and offer practical guidance for designing lightweight semantic segmentation models for embedded applications. Full article

Traditional visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) systems typically generate sparse or semi-dense point cloud maps, which are insufficient for effective navigation and path planning. Constructing navigation maps through dense depth estimation generally entails high computational costs, and depth estimation is prone to errors in weakly textured regions such as road surfaces. Furthermore, traditional visual SLAM methods rely on local relative coordinate systems, making it extremely challenging to merge mapping results from different coordinate frames in navigation systems lacking global positioning constraints. To address these limitations, this paper presents a multi-submap fusion mapping method based on semantic ground fitting and incorporates global navigation satellite system (GNSS) to provide global positioning information via occupancy grid maps. The method emphasizes the integration of low-cost sensors into a unified system, aiming to create an accurate and real-time mapping solution that is cost-effective and highly applicable. Simultaneously, a multi-submap management mechanism is introduced to dynamically store and load maps, updating only the submaps surrounding the vehicle. This ensures real-time map updates while minimizing computational and storage resource consumption. Extensive testing of the proposed method in real-world scenarios, using a self-built experimental platform, demonstrates that the generated grid map meets the accuracy requirements for navigation tasks. Full article

Automated guided vehicles (AGVs) play a critical role in indoor environments, where battery endurance and reliable recharging are essential. This study proposes a multi-sensor fusion approach that integrates LiDAR, depth cameras, and infrared sensors to address challenges in autonomous navigation and automatic recharging. The proposed system overcomes the limitations of LiDAR’s blind spots in near-field detection and the restricted range of vision-based navigation. By combining LiDAR for precise long-distance measurements, depth cameras for enhanced close-range visual positioning, and infrared sensors for accurate docking, the AGV’s ability to locate and autonomously connect to charging stations is significantly improved. Experimental results show a 25% increase in docking success rate (from 70% with LiDAR-only to 95%) and a 70% decrease in docking error (from 10 cm to 3 cm). These improvements demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed sensor fusion method, ensuring more reliable, efficient, and precise operations for AGVs in complex indoor environments. Full article

Although the use of articulated robots and AGVs is common in many industrial sectors such as automotive or aeronautics, the use of mobile manipulators is not widespread nowadays. Even so, the majority of applications separate the navigation and manipulation tasks, avoiding simultaneous movements of the platform and arm. The capability to use mobile manipulators to perform operations on moving objects would open the door to new applications such as the riveting or screwing of parts transported by conveyor belts or AGVs. This paper presents a novel position-based visual servoing (PBVS) architecture for mobile manipulators for precise industrial operations on moving parts. The proposed architecture includes a state machine to guide the process through the different phases of the task to ensure its correct execution. The approach has been validated in an industrial environment for screw-fastening operations, obtaining promising results and metrics. Full article

Automated guided vehicles (AGVs) have become prevalent over the last decade. However, numerous challenges remain, including path planning, security, and the capacity to operate safely in unstructured environments. This study proposes an obstacle avoidance system that leverages deep action learning (DAL) to address these challenges and meet the requirements of Industry 4.0 for AGVs, such as speed, accuracy, and robustness. In the proposed approach, the DAL is integrated into an AGV platform to enhance its visual navigation, object recognition, localization, and decision-making capabilities. Then DAL itself was introduced to combine the work of You Only Look Once (YOLOv4), speeded-up robust features (SURF), and k-nearest neighbor (kNN) and AGV control in indoor visual navigation. The DAL system triggers SURF to differentiate two navigation images, and kNN is used to verify visual distance in real time to avoid obstacles on the floor while searching for the home position. The testing findings show that the suggested system is reliable and fits the needs of advanced AGV operations. Full article

Visual navigation is an important guidance method for industrial automated guided vehicles (AGVs). In the actual guidance, the overexposure environment may be encountered by the AGV lane image, which seriously reduces the accuracy of lane detection. Although the image segmentation method based on deep learning is widely used in lane detection, it cannot solve the problem of overexposure of lane images. At the same time, the requirements of segmentation accuracy and inference speed cannot be met simultaneously by existing segmentation networks. Aiming at the problem of incomplete lane segmentation in an overexposure environment, a lane detection method combining image inpainting and image segmentation is proposed. In this method, the overexposed lane image is repaired and reconstructed by the MAE network, and then the image is input into the image segmentation network for lane segmentation. In addition, a convolutional skip triple attention (CSTA) image segmentation network is proposed. CSTA improves the inference speed of the model under the premise of ensuring high segmentation accuracy. Finally, the lane segmentation performance of the proposed method is evaluated in three image segmentation evaluation metrics (IoU, F₁-score, and PA) and inference time. Experimental results show that the proposed CSTA network has higher segmentation accuracy and faster inference speed. Full article

Autonomous driving is one of the fastest developing fields of robotics. With the ever-growing interest in autonomous driving, the ability to provide robots with both efficient and safe navigation capabilities is of paramount significance. With the continuous development of automation technology, higher levels of autonomous driving can be achieved with vision-based methodologies. Moreover, materials handling in industrial assembly lines can be performed efficiently using automated guided vehicles (AGVs). However, the visual perception of industrial environments is complex due to the existence of many obstacles in pre-defined routes. With the INDTECH 4.0 project, we aim to develop an autonomous navigation system, allowing the AGV to detect and avoid obstacles based in the processing of depth data acquired with a frontal depth camera mounted on the AGV. Applying the RANSAC (random sample consensus) and Euclidean clustering algorithms to the 3D point clouds captured by the camera, we can isolate obstacles from the ground plane and separate them into clusters. The clusters give information about the location of obstacles with respect to the AGV position. In experiments conducted outdoors and indoors, the results revealed that the method is very effective, returning high percentages of detection for most tests. Full article

Industry 4.0 is the fourth industrial revolution consisting of the digitalization of processes facilitating an incremental value chain. Smart Manufacturing (SM) is one of the branches of the Industry 4.0 regarding logistics, visual inspection of pieces, optimal organization of processes, machine sensorization, real-time data adquisition and treatment and virtualization of industrial activities. Among these tecniques, Digital Twin (DT) is attracting the research interest of the scientific community in the last few years due to the cost reduction through the simulation of the dynamic behaviour of the industrial plant predicting potential problems in the SM paradigm. In this paper, we propose a new DT design concept based on external service for the transportation of the Automatic Guided Vehicles (AGVs) which are being recently introduced for the Material Requirement Planning satisfaction in the collaborative industrial plant. We have performed real experimentation in two different scenarios through the definition of an Industrial Ethernet platform for the real validation of the DT results obtained. Results show the correlation between the virtual and real experiments carried out in the two scenarios defined in this paper with an accuracy of 97.95% and 98.82% in the total time of the missions analysed in the DT. Therefore, these results validate the model created for the AGV navigation, thus fulfilling the objectives of this paper. Full article

In the context of Industry 4.0, the most popular way to identify and track objects is to add tags, and currently most companies still use cheap quick response (QR) tags, which can be positioned by computer vision (CV) technology. In CV, instance segmentation (IS) can detect the position of tags while also segmenting each instance. Currently, the mask region-based convolutional neural network (Mask R-CNN) method is used to realize IS, but the completeness of the instance mask cannot be guaranteed. Furthermore, due to the rich texture of QR tags, low-quality images can lower intersection-over-union (IoU) significantly, disabling it from accurately measuring the completeness of the instance mask. In order to optimize the IoU of the instance mask, a QR tag IS method named the mask UNet region-based convolutional neural network (MU R-CNN) is proposed. We utilize the UNet branch to reduce the impact of low image quality on IoU through texture segmentation. The UNet branch does not depend on the features of the Mask R-CNN branch so its training process can be carried out independently. The pre-trained optimal UNet model can ensure that the loss of MU R-CNN is accurate from the beginning of the end-to-end training. Experimental results show that the proposed MU R-CNN is applicable to both high- and low-quality images, and thus more suitable for Industry 4.0. Full article