Motion control for autonomous tugger vehicles in dynamic factory floors shared with human operators

We present a motion controller that generates collision free trajectories for autonomous Tugger vehicles operating in dynamic factory environments, where human operators may coexist. The controller is formalized as a dynamic system of path velocity and heading direction, whose vector fields change a...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Louro, Luís (author)
Other Authors: Malheiro, Tiago (author), Guimarães, Pedro Miguel Ferreira (author), Machado, Toni Daniel Neto (author), Monteiro, Sérgio (author), Silva, Pedro Vaz (author), Erlhagen, Wolfram (author), Bicho, Estela (author)
Format: conferencePaper
Language:eng
Published: 2019
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1822/69777
Country:Portugal
Oai:oai:repositorium.sdum.uminho.pt:1822/69777
Description
Summary:We present a motion controller that generates collision free trajectories for autonomous Tugger vehicles operating in dynamic factory environments, where human operators may coexist. The controller is formalized as a dynamic system of path velocity and heading direction, whose vector fields change as sensory information varies. By design the parameters are tuned so that the control variables are close to an attractor of the resultant dynamics most of the time. This contributes to the overall asymptotically stability of the system and makes it robust against perturbations. We present several experiments, in a real factory environment, that highlight different innovative features of the navigation system - flexible and safe solutions for human-aware autonomous navigation in dynamic and cluttered environments. This means, besides generating online collision free trajectories between via points, the system detects the presence of humans, interact with them showing awareness of their presence, and generate adequate motor behavior.