To delight customers and ensure the profitability of your AGV or AMR sale, quick and efficient commissioning (installation) is the key.
Commissioning (installing) a vehicle on a customer site is generally the most critical time of a project. It can also be the most stressful and expensive.
BlueBotics’ team of expert engineers has installed, and helped customers to install, hundreds of AGV, AMRs and automated forklifts at sites around the world. Drawing on over 25 years of industry experience, we’ve rounded up seven top tips for AGV/AMR commissioning success.
The better you understand your customer’s site, and how their automated guided vehicles will operate within it, the smoother the AGV commissioning process will run.
“An ideal installation happens when the AGV buyer is well prepared, which helps you to be well prepared”
- Mathias Perrollaz – Head of Systems Engineering at BlueBotics
This means that your customer must have considered its desired AGV or AMR operation in-depth.
To ensure that is the case, here is a quick checklist of questions to ask prior to your arrival on-site:
“An ideal installation happens when the AGV buyer is well prepared, which helps you to be well prepared,” says BlueBotics' Head of Systems Engineering, Mathias Perrollaz. “If everything can be prepared well in advance – routes, actions, nodes – then your installation team will just need to concentrate on tuning the vehicle and mapping the site.”
According to BlueBotics’ VP of Development, Grégoire Terrien, probably the worst mistake a company can make is to try and install a vehicle that is not ready.
“If everything can be prepared well in advance – routes, actions, nodes – then your installation team will just need to concentrate on tuning the vehicle and mapping the site.”
“Many companies – especially startup producers – feel the need to grow fast and therefore rush to install a vehicle that is not ready to be installed. This never goes well,” he explains. “It means effectively finishing your vehicle at the customer’s site, which gives a terrible impression and usually leads to bad vehicle performance.”
Commissioning a vehicle is expensive for you, exhausting for your staff, and (as production may be shut down for an undefined period of time) risky for your customer. Commissioning a vehicle which is not ready is exponentially more expensive, exhausting and risky.
This should be part of the planning process, but it is worth highlighting: do not underestimate the potential of small environmental factors to bring a commissioning process to a grinding halt.
System engineer Guillaume Rosa-Serrano provides an example: “The laser scanners used for localization on one company’s AGV were 2.7 meters above the ground. At one customer’s site the floor sloped down to the center in a soft V-shape, to make sure any water drained away. The AGV was supposed to see the walls of the room as references. The initial installation was done with empty pallets in place and everything worked fine. But, when real pallets were added, the AGV would always become lost because the full pallets were 2.60 meters high which, with the V-shaped floor, meant the AGV could not see any walls at all.”
Once the issue was detected, the team were able to quickly correct it – but this example demonstrates that the environment must be taken into account.
When working with the simulation (and then later on site) consider the following points:
ANT offers a lot of tools to help with these issues, such as charging strategies which favor vehicles with the lowest charge, and traffic management for large vehicles which may block others while turning. In fact, any issue you have, it’s likely that our Support Team has worked through it before. Get in touch and there might be a solution waiting for you.
It is important to have access to your vehicle’s components during installation in order to avoid delays, says Terrien: “This is particularly important for drives – you might need to tune their parameters or replace them if not. You should also prepare safety components so you have these on hand, like redundant encoders.”
Before deploying your client’s AGVs, always fully simulate the project you have created.
In the case of automated vehicles that run on BlueBotics’ ANT lite+ platform, simulations are carried out using ANT server and ANT vehicle simulator software. This allows you to simulate not only basic missions such as single-vehicle picking and dropping, but even full fleet operations including traffic management. It is possible to remotely create a digital twin of the customer site in ANT server using CAD files of the building. You can then add the installation in ANT server and ANT vehicle simulator to anticipate and solve issues before they happen.
“Before deploying your client’s AGVs, be sure to fully simulate the project you have created.”
Camille Boymond of BlueBotics’ project management team (previously a systems engineer), describes a recent commissioning that went smoothly due to the simulations run beforehand: “Working together with our customer, a leading AGV producer, we simulated the end client’s project, which was an installation of five vehicles. Through this, we managed to solve all the traffic issues in advance. We even developed specific devices for the client that we were also able to test.”
The team had been assigned four days to get everything up and running, Boymond says. “We changed a few details on the vehicle to have the behavior the customer wanted, then we tested all the positions with all the vehicles to ensure high accuracy. In the end, we could already prove on day three that the project worked. That meant we had plenty of time to solve those unplanned issues that always pop up and we could leave the site with the client’s AGVs running in production exactly as expected.”
Any time taken in creating the simulation is saved on site as a well-designed simulation can be added directly to the final project.
The value of such a thorough check should not be underestimated. It is perfectly possible to resolve issues ahead of time – vastly reducing you and your client’s stress level when they finally click “GO”.
In addition to careful planning, your client’s own staff will also determine success of their AGV program.
Therefore, it pays to encourage your client to do the following:
In addition to fully train your client’s AGV operators, it is also a good idea to create – or help them to create – an operation manual. Your navigation technology partner, such as BlueBotics, can likely help with this.
It is rare for the commissioning process to go 100% smoothly. While you can minimize the pain to a large extent, there will almost always be some hiccups.
One key to success is your relationship with your customer’s team. Be flexible, communicate well, and together adopt a problem-solving mindset,” explains system engineer Armand Lamouille. “A positive spirit of collaboration will make commissioning vehicles more likely to succeed and make the experience more pleasant overall.”
Clearly defining roles ahead of time can help smooth the process: who is responsible for what task?
Lastly, and especially if you are new to commissioning AGVs, never underestimate the time required to fine-tune a project before launch. This will take longer than you imagine, but it will be time well spent because it will minimize your client’s future support requests.
Get in touch to learn how quickly and cost-effectively vehicles driven by Autonomous Navigation Technology (ANT) can be commissioned.