Conshohoken, USA, January 5, 2018
ASTM International’s committee on driverless automatic guided industrial vehicles has approved its first four standards. These standards provide consensus terminology as well as initial test methods and practices that will help manufacturers measure performance, including specific tasks for vehicles. Organisers believe that this technical foundation will support industry growth.
“Automatic guided vehicles, or AGVs, have been around since the 1950s,” says committee chairman Roger Bostelman, project manager in the Intelligent Systems Division at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology. “Over the years, the body of research on mobile robots has grown, including autonomous navigation and docking capabilities. But only now do we have standards in this area, including a single set of terms that helps us measure and evaluate products.”
The first standard is a compilation of relevant terminology. The second requires practices that helps record the test environment for automatic through autonomous unmanned ground vehicles (A-UGVs). The third is a standard that helps test the A-UGV’s ability to navigate various physical and virtual boundaries; while the fourth standard test method that simultaneously measures an obstruction entering the A-UGV path and the A-UGV position, as well as the decrease in vehicle speed, thereby measuring reduction in kinetic energy
Bostelman and other committee members are encouraging people in the AGV community to join. “Knowing how users wish to specifically apply these vehicles to their needs would be helpful in our standards development,” he says.
The next meeting of ASTM International committee on driverless automatic guided industrial vehicles will be held in December 2018 in Washington DC, USA.
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