4. Mobile Robots

Mobile robots move around using wheels or tracks and are usually powered by electric motors. They are also known as Autonomous Guided Vehicles (AGV's)

 

Click to mobile robots in action
1. How do these find their way about the floor?	2. Truck Loading without a driver!	3. Hospital Robots: working alongside nurses they are useful for carrying around food, laundry etc?	4. Warehouse workers: What has happened to all the people who used to work in warehouses?
Fork Lift	Truck Loading	Hospital Workers	Warehouse worker

 

Guiding Mobile Robots

 

In factories there are two ways of guiding mobile robots: using magnetic guides or by using light guides

1. Magnetic Guides

Guiding robots by buried wire guides! Click to Go Larger Screen

1. A cable buried in the floor gives off a magnetic field.
   
   
2. Sensors suspended underneath the robot detect the magnetic field and feed the data back to the processor controlling the robot.
   
   
3. The processor then uses this information to send out signals to control the direction of the robot’s wheels

 

Advantage

• Dirt on the floor has no effect on the guidance of the robot. - doesn't mask any guiding lines.

Disadvantage

Have to think very carefully about where the robots go. To change their route would involve digging up the wires and relaying them in the floor. This can be expensive.

 

In the Linn Systems factory, the mobile robots, which are used to carry materials around the factory floor, used magnetic guides to follow the cables buried in the factory floor. Click on the button below to watch again.

 

2. Light Guides

Guiding robots by using light guides Click to Go Larger Screen

1. The robot shines a light on to the floor.
   
   
2. This light is reflected back off the white or black line and is picked up by light sensors that are positioned underneath the robot.
   
   
3. The information about reflected light is fed from the sensors back to the processor.
   
   
4. Then, just as with magnetic guides, the processor then uses this information to send out signals to control the movement of the robot.

Advantage

Laying out new routes for robots is cheap and easy. Just a matter of laying down new lines for the robots to follow.

 

Disadvantage.

Lines can be easily marked by dirt or worn away. Then robots can lose their way.

 

 

 

What you have to do!

Either in a new Word Document or in your Brain. Under a sub heading Mobile Robots complete the following tasks after watching each of the videos above:

1. Describe the job being done by the mobile robots in the Linn Systems factory.
2. What kind of guidance system did the Linn robots have?
3. How did this type of guidance system operate?
4. List the sensors attached to the Linn Systems mobile robots.

 

 

What you should now be able to do!

• Be able to describe mobile robots and the kind of work they do.

• Describe the two methods by which mobile robots can be guided around the factory floor.

• Be able to give an advantage and disadvantage to each of the two guidance systems..

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Continue to 5. CAD/CAM