Abstracts Physics

Lightweight Simulator for Automated Guided Vehicles

by Toni Härkönen

Automatic solutions are rapidly being adopted by the world’s leading industries to cut costs and improve effciency for processes, which have previously required human operators. However, as the automation of heavy machinery involves expensive hardware, the development and testing of automated solutions can be slow and costly. One solution to avoid this problem is to create a simulation of the physical environment and do preliminary software functionality testing in simulation only. This thesis examines the implementation of a lightweight simulation environment for the evaluation of software used to control automated guided straddle carriers. The simulator is based on Gazebo, an open-source robotics simulation software with support for multiple physics engines, which allows for advanced and fexible physics simulation. The aim of the thesis was to implement a minimum-viable-product type of simulation environment, where a simplifed model of the straddle carrier can be controlled through the real machine control system, using pre-existing operating tools for both manual and automatic guidance. This was achieved by creating software with a layered architecture, where interprocess communication protocols are utilized to create communication channels between the machine control system, virtual device layer, and the physics simulator. In the future, the simulator will be extended to support more advanced features of the automated guided vehicle, such as picking and placing containers.