Wireless Communication Technologies in Automated Guided Vehicles: Survey and Analysis

Nowadays Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) have been widely ultilized in modern production and manufacturing industry. As wireless communication is one of the key technologies in AGVs, one goal of this paper is to present a comprehansive review of two most commonly used wireless standards in current AGV systems, namely ZigBee and IEEE 802.11. We showed that low latency and high reliability are two stringent requirements in a Cyber-Physical System (CPS) based AGVs system. Based on these analysis, we propose directions on possible wireless communication standards that may suitable for future researches of AGVs, as these solutions are specially optimized/designed for machine type communications (MTCs), and can provide much better performance than currently employed ones.