GEOMOVE

Robots are being highly used nowadays for goods transportation in warehouses and logistic scenarios. In some of them, such as in the aeronautic industry, the weight of the components require powerful AGVs to accomplish the task. Moreover the dimension of some components require more than one robot to carry out the task, such as, for example, the transportation of an airplane wing. Current commercial solutions accomplish this by mechanically attaching two robots. However, this somehow limits the size of the object that can be transported.

In GEOMOVE project, we have gone beyond the state of the art to develop a wireless cooperative transportation solution, that allows for large objects cooperative transportation without mechanical attachment between the robots.

Our partner, ARITEX CADING S.A., developed highly maneuverable omnidirectional robots; while at Eurecat we have developed the algorithms and implemented the software for the alignment and control. We were able to accomplish a mean alignment error below the centimeter, so that the load doesn’t suffer of any negative effect caused by torsions.

Also, we have developed and implemented a non-intrusive localisation solution with autonomous navigation and obstacle avoidance capabilities, able of accurately positioning an AGV in a determined, large-scale, industrial environment, minimizing the need for auxiliary installations in the infrastructure of the industrial warehouse and, therefore, suitable not only for newly created industrial processing environments, but also for the improvement of existing industrial processing environments.

Related Publications

C. Rizzo, A. Lagraña and D. Serrano, “GEOMOVE: Detached AGVs for Cooperative Transportation of Large and Heavy Loads in the Aeronautic Industry,” 2020 IEEE International Conference on Autonomous Robot Systems and Competitions (ICARSC), Ponta Delgada, Portugal, 2020, pp. 126-133, doi: 10.1109/ICARSC49921.2020.9096078. [https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9096078]