Autonomous on-board locating system for determining the position and protecting against collision of robot and industrial trucks

摘要

When mobile robots or driverless industrial trucks have to approach arbitrarily predeterminable point targets with high accuracy in known operational areas which are partly built up (storage halls and others), a flexible locating system with low position measuring errors is called for which avoids collisions. Conventional guide aids such as induction loops and unreferenced compound navigation methods only incompletely meet these requirements. According to the invention, this object is achieved by an on-board locating system (Figure 2) in which distance sensors (13, 14) are used for continuously measuring the instantaneous distances of the vehicle from the lateral track limits for the purpose of referencing compound navigation. The distance sensors (15, 16) can be optionally used for measuring in or in opposition to the direction of travel. All measurement values are continuously compared with the digital map of the operational area, contained in an electronic reference memory (25), by means of a correlation circuit (26) and the position data associated in each case with the correlation peak are read out of the reference memory (25). A subsequent decision circuit (28) selects the correct position for the steering computer from the two available position measurement values (compound or reference data) on the basis of a plausibility check. <IMAGE>