Safety and efficiency management in LGV operated warehouses

In the industrial world, physical borders between men and machines are vanishing because of the collaborative tasks imposed by the new productive methods. Clearly, this poses safety issues which were not present in classical plants. For example, safety problems naturally arise in the case of autonomously guided industrial vehicles because, for obvious service needs, they share their workspace with human coworkers: only limited physical protections can be adopted. In this context, a speed planner has been recently proposed for the management of the laser guided vehicles operating in automatic warehouses. Such planner does not only generate efficient trajectories, but it also ensures that they are safe. This work describes, after a brief survey on the safety management in automatic warehouses, the tests which were carried out for the experimental validation of the planner. Tests were first executed in a demonstration plant appositely designed and, later, in a real warehouse by considering actual operating conditions. The validation campaign in the production plant lasted several months, thus allowing the acquisition of a consistent amount of statistical data.