Design of a LiDAR sensor to help AGVs avoid obstacles

As the 4th industrial revolution progresses, smart factories will be able to offer customized and flexible manufacturing systems of great value. As manufacturing systems get smarter and include more automation, Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) are becoming one of the most important technologies in this process. However, in practice, AGVs usually requires magnetic or optical tape to guide them, this can be inconvenient and costly. LiDAR has been widely proposed to solve this problem. However, existing LiDAR for AGVs still experiences the deadlock problem, this is a problem caused by the difference in processing speed during data matching between the SLAM algorithm and LiDAR. Therefore, in order to solve this problem we must tackle it more actively than commercial LiDAR currently does. In this paper, we propose a LiDAR which has a horizontal field of view of 270°, an angular resolution of 0.1°, and a scan rate from 10 Hz to 30 Hz. This suggested LiDAR would then be able to compensate for distance errors using the reflectance of an object. Also, optimized technology for AGV applications has been developed and applied to the suggested LiDAR. Through these advances, it is possible to obtain high accuracy driving performance. In the future, the proposed technology is expected to promote more smart factory within the manufacturing industry.