On the position measurement of automated guided vehicles using pseudorandom encoding

The authors discuss the application of pseudorandom encoding to the absolute position measurement of automated guided vehicles (AGVs). The proposed measurement technique allows AGVs to recover their absolute position at any point on the guide-path. Besides the obvious guide-path, this method requires two additional 1-bit wide tracks, one for the pseudorandom code and the other for synchronization. An original scanning method was developed, solving the problem of the code-reading ambiguities and at the same time doubling the position-measuring resolution. Experimental results on the application of the proposed technique are presented