Navigation systems for AGVs and AMRs are typically designed to work inside production halls, assembly halls, and warehouses, with vehicles calculating their positions by referencing the internal environment, driving on smooth, flat floors, and never being affected by the weather. But not all customer transports take place inside. Here we explore these use cases in depth and discuss how ANT navigation can enable them.
Today a myriad of outdoor transport processes exist. Most are currently handled by large, manually-driven forklifts. However, with the challenge of hiring and retention driving up the cost of forklift drivers in many markets – not to mention the safety and damage issues associated with manual trucks – AGVs and AMRs are increasingly being requested to work outdoors.
Generally speaking, when it comes to outdoor AGV use, two key use cases stand out:
Moving payloads between buildings: often required, for example, in the case of steel and aluminum production, and in the automotive sector.
Moving payloads between logistics & production sites: common in industries such as tire production, where logistics and production operations are often housed in separate, unlinked buildings.
Operating AGVs outdoors was traditionally a real challenge.
For vehicles driven by natural feature navigation, the lack of features in the environment made it difficult to calculate a vehicle’s position. This, in turn, meant additional infrastructure often needed to be installed, such as ground-installed reflector posts. This obviously added time, cost, and complexity.
Meanwhile, in the case of older, traditional outdoor AGVs (such as those used at sea ports), the installation of GPS-based vehicles was complex and difficult, with the obvious limitation that these vehicles could not be used indoors since there was no longer a GPS signal available.
This meant that to moving goods between different indoor environments effectively required three different vehicles:
An indoor AGV to move materials to the door.
An outdoor system (usually a manual vehicle), to collect and transfer these loads.
Another indoor AGV to retrieve these loads from the door for redistribution elsewhere.
This approach was obviously expensive and inefficient.
So, indoor systems – whether driven by natural navigation or laser triangulation – struggle to navigate outside due to the lack of references (used to calculate the vehicle’s position).
And outdoor-only systems – driven by some version of GPS or GNSS – simply can’t function inside since there is no GPS signal available.
At BlueBotics we have solved this challenge by incorporating these two technologies into one combined ANT navigation stack. By using sensor fusion, we take the data from the two different positioning systems and use whichever is the most useful – allowing an automated vehicle to work indoors, outdoors, and to transition smoothly between the two.
So yes, ‘ANT driven’ vehicles can operate effectively outside. We call this solution ANT everywhere.
ANT everywhere meets the challenge of outdoor operation by adding high-precision GNSS as an additional data source when calculating a vehicle’s position.
This video explains how:
No, ANT everywhere is an extension product for our existing ANT navigation systems. A vehicle must have an ANT navigation system already integrated inside in order for ANT everywhere to be added.
Several BlueBotics customers have successfully deployed ANT everywhere to date. Here are just two of their comments:
“BlueBotics’ ANT everywhere solution, which allows for precise outdoor navigation, brings something we couldn’t achieve with our previous systems and has opened up new possibilities for outdoor AGV applications.” - Joseph Cotterill, Automation and Technology Installation Manager, MasterMover.
“With ANT everywhere our vehicles can now navigate both indoors, using natural navigation, and outdoors, by adding GNSS. Changing from one system to the other is completely automatic, you don’t even notice it. And BlueBotics' support is great. We've installed an ANT everywhere AGV at Barcelona Airport and customers from many other industries are also interested - just think how many organizations have processes going into and out of warehouses!“ - Jaume Graells, General Manager, MOVVO.
To learn more about ANT everywhere, click to read the brochure, or get in touch with our expert team to discuss ANT everywhere might get your vehicle outside.