Abstract

The main purpose of this project is trying to understand where current technology could lead us both in metaphorical and literal way. The subject of this thesis is to build up an Automatic Guided Vehicle (AGV from now on) and define its usability in real life environment and, obviously, its limits.
According to this, we chose to implement an AGV which we could simulate real environment with. Great care was paid in choosing the environment for it should be enough simple to be handled by the robot and at the same time enough complex to resemble real life. For our purpose we decided to simulate a dynamic maze, much similar to what a big parking lot is.
Actually the idea is to construct an AGV which is able to pick up drivers who just parked their car and bring them to a near big facility which could be an airport or a station. We will show later in this paper that the idea is not completely new; the Schipol airport near Amsterdam has an AGV called FROG which is able to do what we explained before; however this FROG AGV simply follow pre-established paths therefore it does not take into account any dynamic information and the main consequence of its routing algorithm is that it will blindly go in a congested road contributing itself to the jam in the parking lot. Our goal in this research is to study and finally make a reliable proposal of an AGV which will move through the parking lot 'reasonably', avoiding jam or blocked road and safely transporting people to their goal maybe playing music meanwhile.