Various Aspects of Material Handling

This chapter presents various aspects of material handling devices. At first, brief guidelines about the way to select various material handling devices is provided, followed by various material handling tasks and equipment. Based on the subject matter of this book, this chapter provides an overview of various intelligent techniques which have been applied to various aspects of intelligent vehicles. The last section provides overviews of all the subsequent chapters.

Industrial Trucks and Cranes

This chapter discusses industrial trucks and cranes. Various types of industrial trucks, and various types of cranes along with their chronological history and list of leading manufacturers are presented in this chapter. The last section discusses the applications of various intelligent techniques on industrial trucks and cranes.

Industrial Robot

This chapter provides various aspects of industrial robots. The various aspects which have been discussed are history of industrial robots, various application areas of industrial robots, general characteristics, and essential components of industrial robots. After this, concepts of robot motion, type of joints of industrial robots, various power sources for the robots are discussed. Next, the characteristics of various types of industrial robots are presented, followed by a list of leading manufacturers and research studies on industrial robots, along with the research studies on the performance of robots in various uncertain environments.

Automated Guided Vehicles

This chapter provides various aspects of Automated Guided Vehicles (AGV). Starting from the history of the AGVs and list of leading manufacturers of various types of AGVs in the first two sections, the third section provides the structural framework of AGV and various supported technologies, followed by the benefits of using AGVs. After this, the various types of AGVs and their characteristics along with various other features are discussed. Next two sections discuss the various guide paths and guide path configurations of the AGVs, followed by various control strategies such as scheduling, routing and deadlock handling for the AGVs.

Conveyors, Casters, and Wheels

This chapter introduces various concepts related to industrial conveyors, casters and wheels. At first, conveyors are discussed. Various types of conveyors are presented along with their characteristics. After describing the general components common to all conveyors, a chronological history is overviewed, followed by the introduction of the various types of conveyors. Each of the conveyors is described as minutely as possible. After this, the list of leading manufacturers, followed by an example scenario for the application of conveyors is presented. Then, some notes about the guidelines of the conveyors is discussed and recent conveyor technologies are discussed. Next section focuses on casters and wheels. After describing the basic structure of the casters, various types of casters are discussed along with details about the various aspects. The next section discusses various types of wheels. The last section discusses the applications of various intelligent techniques, especially on conveyors.

Other Vehicles and Future Trends

This chapter contains only one section and is a very small chapter. This chapter basically shows the technological trends of various technologies so that the researchers and practitioners can get the glimpse of these technologies so as to apply them in their studies and applications.