◎ Weng Tingting 

As traditional labor-intensive, fund-intensive and technology-intensive tire industry, along with disappearing of demographic dividend and enhancement of restraint of resources, energy and environment, catching up with and surpassing international advanced technological level, improving the quality uniformity and brand reputation of the products as well as accelerating supply-side structural reform are extremely urgent. Intelligent tire production has become an irreversible development trend and intelligent manufacturing has become the only road for China to be a rubber industry power.

AGV, as the core part of intelligent logistics of intelligent factory, can realize unmanned and automatic handling during logistics, which plays an important role in lowering production cost and improving economic benefits of the enterprise.

“Pilot Demonstration of Intelligent Tire Factory” project of some tire factory is one of the first batch of 46 pilot demonstrative projects in “Specific Project for Pilot Demonstration of Intelligent Manufacturing” initiated by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in 2015, which integrates ERP system, tire digital manufacturing control system, tire semi-finished product RFID control network system, barcode logistics system, RFID tire electronic label packaging, mirrorless laser forklift AGV handling system, etc.

Some tire factory takes AGVS as the subject of implementation to get through the data chain of the systems such as MES, WMS and ERP, thus realizing real-time information management of the whole intelligent logistics system. AGV mirrorless laser autonomous navigation forklift AGV is the leading part in transformation of flexible intelligent logistics of this factory, which combines with WMS system and RFID information recognition system and get through with ERP system to realize unmanning and intelligentization of the whole workshop.
The working principle of AGV automatic guided vehicle is: by self-developed navigation and positioning algorithm, using laser sensor to scan the surrounding environment, building a map in the system and the laser sensor constantly obtains the environment information during travel of AGV to match with the data in the map for positioning, and cooperates with the motion controller to realize automatic travel of AGV by control algorithm.

Flexible intelligent logistics system of mirrorless laser forklift AGV transforms the logistics of the whole factory and reaches the purposes of saving the labor, preventing errors during production process and regulating the management, thus becoming a benchmark case for intelligent logistics transformation of tire industry.

Big data analysis shows that after the “intelligent logistics system of mirrorless laser forklift AGV” is applied, the enterprise has obvious improvement in aspects such as product quality (the yield is improved by 0.5%), lean manufacturing (the line edge inventory declines by 50%) and standard management (the error rate is lowered).

Meanwhile, mirrorless laser autonomous navigation forklift AGV can save 100 forklift operators and over 40 manual forklifts for the enterprise and save the labor and equipment cost of about 10 Million Yuan each year.

The superiority of mirrorless laser autonomous navigation is displayed in five aspects: firstly, it does not need paving of any navigation marks and realizes flexible handling, thus saving the input cost; secondly, it builds the global navigation map by itself, which equals to an indoor GPS station, can navigate to any place in the workshop and is not limited by the navigation marks, thus realizing handling in the whole factory; thirdly, the time of building map is short and the construction is fast, thus efficiently shortening the cycle of the project; fourthly, the later adjustment and maintenance are simple and rapid. If the process or raw material is changed and the AGV path needs to the changed, we only need to adjust the map; fifthly, the production and handling beat is rapid, and can reach the speed limit of manual forklift (1.6m/s), and it can adapt to the crowded production environment, thus the AGV utilization rate is maximized.

Successful application of mirrorless laser navigation forklift AGV is derived from the mirrorless laser autonomous navigation technology with international advanced level independently developed by China, which has obtained the patent for invention in China and America. Large-scale application of such product will bring about qualitative improvement for automatic handling of tire enterprises.

As a high-tech enterprise independently developing unmarked navigation forklift AGV in China and realizing large-scale cluster application, with its products sold well at home and abroad, Suzhou AGV Robot Co., Ltd. not only helps JD to put into production the first 10.5 line in the world, but also serves the enterprises such as Turkey VESTEL, famous consumer electronics and appliance manufacturer in Europe, Thermos, famous vacuum cup manufacturer in the world, Jushi Group, glass fiber manufacturer as well as domestic automobile manufacturers such as Zhuzhou BAIC and Great Wall Motor. In the future, unmarked navigation forklift AGV will play a more important role in realizing intelligent tire production.