AGVs 101: Your Guide To Autonomous Warehouse Vehicles

With 70% of U.S. businesses reporting labor shortages, it won't be long before automation becomes necessary to stay competitive. Already, 60% of automotive manufacturing facilities use AGVs, and 80% of e-commerce distribution centers rely on automation. Moreover, those industries aren't alone. A June 2024 nationwide survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond showed that 65% of businesses considered automation a strategic priority, and 60% planned to implement labor-reducing automation in the next year.

Yet, with material handling automation evolving faster than ever, it can be challenging to understand what sorts of automation will best fit your operation. With that in mind, consider this your primer on one of the most popular and effective forms of automation, AGVs. Read on to learn what AGVs actually are, what they do, and how they can benefit your business.

What Are AGVs?

Automated guided vehicles (AGVs) are robots. These self-operating machines utilize sensors, cameras, external markers, and/or pre-defined routes to move products and materials within a designated facility, requiring no human intervention. AGVs are tailored to fulfill specific transportation functions. As such, they come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes with any number of specialized modifications.

What Do AGVs Do?

The versatility of AGVs allows them to operate in all kinds of environments and move many different materials. Some examples include:

• Transportation of hazardous materials
• Just-in-time delivery of components to production lines
• Point-to-point movement of goods and pallets
• Automated crop harvesting
• Transportation of finished goods to storage or shipping
• Restocking runs such as medication, linens, and medical supplies within a hospital

The list goes on and on, but at their core, each AGV performs one service in common. AGVs automate a task that a human worker would find either tedious, dangerous, or time-consuming or to which a human would contribute no additional value. AGVs take care of the jobs that people either don't want to do, shouldn't waste time on, or can't do. What AGVs don't do is eliminate the value human staff adds to your operation.

How Do AGVs Benefit My Business?

AGVs are like a gently rising tide. They elevate every facet of any material handling operation. Some of these improvements are subtle, but others make an enormous difference.

Improve Safety

Human error consistently ranks as one of the top factors leading to workplace accidents. AGVs reduce or eliminate the opportunity for human error to occur. Utilizing environmental sensor arrays and advanced collision avoidance software, these machines are highly adept at surveying their surroundings and identifying hazards. Unlike humans, AGV forklifts never get distracted.

Maximize Space

As land prices increase, many operations find space at a premium. Most autonomous warehouse vehicles are smaller than their manned counterparts. AGVs, like automated forklifts, can operate in spaces too tight for other material handling vehicles, allowing storage facilities and distribution centers to convert to narrow aisle layouts. Eliminating wasted aisle space can increase warehouse storage capacity by 30% to 40%.

Reduce Employee Turnover

The blessing and curse of being human is to be a thinking creature. While our highly developed brains allow us to add great value to many pursuits, repetitive jobs quickly become tedious. Research into jobs with a high level of tedium shows these positions experience a significantly higher turnover than jobs that require more problem-solving. AGVs, like automated tow tractors, handle the mind-numbing tasks of repetitive transport so that your human team members find their roles more engaging and fulfilling.

Improve Productivity

By eliminating mindless tasks from their workload, your human staff suddenly have hours more time each shift to focus on the areas where they can add value. For example, the average warehouse picker wastes 60% of their day walking products between storage and shipping. Even if a warehouse AGV only eliminated half of that walking, that’s still 30% more time that picker spends fulfilling orders.

Optimization Data Generation

AGVs constantly gather information about their environments, routes, and themselves. This information is invaluable for understanding the state of your operation. It helps identify inefficiencies and offers insight into how your workflow can continue to improve.

Reduce Errors

Research suggests the average American makes approximately five mistakes every hour, increasing to fifteen when the worker is stressed or tired. Stress and fatigue are part of everyday life, so your team is making anywhere between 40 and 120 mistakes per worker per shift. AGVs suffer from no such frailties. These machines complete each task with almost unvarying precision and consistency, dropping your facility's error rate near zero.

Improve Scalability

The target outcome of improved optimization is business growth, which means your facility will ideally grow from a medium-sized operation to a large one. That can present a problem for businesses relying on analog strategies. However, AGVs scale easily. Because they operate as a network of units, additional AGVs are easy to add to your existing process as your business growth demands. This flexibility means you can expand without the interruption of major process overhauls.

Where Can I Learn More About AGVs?

We are all living in the fourth industrial revolution. Technology is advancing at a pace rarely seen in human history, and AGVs are a part of that racing evolution. This emerging technology improves almost daily, quickly outdating static information sources. Your best bet for up-to-date, reliable information about the state of the industry is a trusted warehouse automation integration partner.

At The Lilly Company, we've stayed on the cutting edge of material handling technology for over a century and continue to evolve to meet the needs of our clients. Our warehouse automation experts have the skills to help you discover not only the latest and greatest in material handling but also what technology will best serve your operation for years to come. Let us transform your warehouse. Contact us online or visit one of our locations to learn more about what warehouse automation can do for you:

Arkansas - Jonesboro
Alabama - Dothan, Irondale, Mobile, and Montgomery
Mississippi - Richland and Tupelo
Tennessee - Jackson and Memphis

Further Reading
Product Review: Toyota Core Tow Tractor Automated Forklift
Product Review: Bastian Solutions ML2 AV
Product Review: T7AMR Robotic Floor Scrubber