Automated guided vehicles position control: a systematic literature review

Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) are essential elements of manufacturing intralogistics and material handling. Improving the position accuracy along the AGV trajectory allows the vehicle to work on narrower aisles with lower error tolerance. Despite the increasing number of papers in AGVs and mobile robots' position control research area, there is a lack of curatorial work presenting and analyzing the control strategies applied in the problem domain. Therefore, the main objective is to analyze the published researches of the past seven years on the position control of AGVs to recognize research patterns, gaps, and tendencies, outlining the research field. The paper proposes a systematic literature review to investigate the research field from the controller design perspective. Its protocol and procedures are presented in detail. Four main research topics were addressed: the control strategies used in the AGV position control problem, how the literature presents the AGV operating requirement of position accuracy, how the literature validate the proposed controller and present their results regarding the system's position accuracy, and the technological tendencies the proposed solutions reveals. Besides, within the main topics, other points were investigated, such as the AGV application area, the considered mathematical model, the sensors and guidance system used, and the maximum payload of the vehicle and operation under different load conditions. The data synthesis shows the predominant control strategies applied to the problem and the interaction among distinct control theory areas, indicating a notable interaction of Intelligent Control techniques to the other strategies. The paper's contributions are using a systematic literature review method over the AGV position control publications, presenting an overview of the research area, analyzing the research question topics from selected articles, and proposing a research agenda.