By Roger Renstrom

Is there an autonomously operated forklift in your future?

A US Government industrial autonomous vehicle (IAV) project has included forklifts, wooden pallets and shrink-wrapped loads in advanced trials.

The US National Institute of Standards & Technology's (NIST) intelligent systems division conducted demonstrations in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and developed algorithms suitable for any advanced automatic guided vehicle (AGV) including forklifts. NIST is part of the US Department of Commerce.

Transbotics Corp, of Charlotte, North Carolina, collaborated under an NIST cooperative research & development agreement and funded research on vehicle interfaces unique to its needs. Publicly traded Transbotics employs 45 people and creates automation solutions with an emphasis on AGVs, including single steer, fork style, laser guided vehicles.

"In [several] years, the AGV will become an autonomous guided vehicle," said Lennart Johansson, Transbotics vice president of software engineering. Currently, however, autonomous technology was considered too expensive for traditional applications, making it economically "difficult to justify that level of smartness".

More research is planned. "We hope to follow on with a larger group of forklift vendors and users who perhaps have similar challenges to what we studied," said Roger Bostelman, a NIST project manager. "A consortium of industry experts would be ideal."

"The sole purpose of the IAV project is to transfer technology and work directly with industry to solve challenges," Bostelman said. "Transbotics came to us with a challenge to visualise pallets and verify their location using non-contact imaging technology."

The test set-up used 48-inch (1.2-metre) long forks, wooden pallets measuring 40 inches (1.0 metre) by 48 inches (1.2 metres) and a load nearly eight feet high (2.4 metres).