A 6-vehicle laser-guided AGV fleet, a worked fleet-sizing calculation, roller-to-roller conveyor integration, barcode-based load tracking, and a SCADA-level fleet management system coordinating it all.
The project brief: a distribution center's put-away and replenishment area, where 6 laser-guided AGVs move pallets between a receiving conveyor, 480 rack storage lanes, and a shipping staging conveyor at a 90-pallet-per-hour peak rate. This is the program's multi-subsystem integration case study — AGV navigation, a fixed conveyor network the AGVs mechanically interface with, barcode-driven load tracking, and a fleet management layer coordinating 6 independently-mobile vehicles all have to work together, and each one constrains the others.
This module walks the whole project the way a real material-handling automation engineer would: why laser-SLAM navigation was chosen over wire-guided alternatives, a worked fleet-sizing calculation against the throughput requirement, the roller-to-roller conveyor interface standard, zone-based traffic reservation versus relying on collision avoidance alone, and a worked opportunity-charging calculation that keeps the fleet running without scheduled downtime. The full worked numbers, complete bill of materials, and finished design reasoning are part of the unlocked module below.