| Abstract: |
Warehouses in Hong Kong nowadays are mostly managed and operated manually, which suffers from problems of shortage of low-technology labours, poor management efficiency and unoptimized space utilisation etc. Arisen by the increased manpower cost, logistic and supply chain industries in Hong Kong have shown interests in applying autonomous guided vehicles (AGVs) on their warehouse operations. Together with other advanced electronic and communication technologies, a fully integrated, automated, and optimized production flow can be realized, which leads to greater productivity and efficiency. One challenge is AGV positioning, there is a lack of a real-time, precise and flexible positioning technique for such application. Impulse-radio (IR) technology has been researched intensively lately, its short impulse nature provides excellent ranging ability and reliable indoor communication. This project aims to study the state-of-the-art IR technology and investigate its indoor positioning performance, the outcomes can prove the feasibility of applying IR technolgy on real-time AGV positioning. An IR indoor positioning system based on IR transceivers will be designed; hardware, positioning algorithms and related software will be researched and implemented. Pilot runs will be performed inside a Hong Kong warehouse with AGVs presented |
