Design and Development of Automatic Guided Vehicle Systems for Transportation of Bags

Abstract

The continuous flow process type manufacturing industries such as food, beverage, chemical, cement etc. are continuously adopting changes in their manufacturing systems for achieving the efficient manufacturing process. Since continuous flow process industries are making the same product every day; they always focused on improvement in their manufacturing process. Even so, in this advanced technological era, many cement industries are practicing manual packaging system. Nowadays to sustain in the competitive world, cement industries are continuously adopting cutting-edge technology and moving towards automation for the packing system. This project is carried out in a packaging unit of the cement manufacturing industry. Most of the cement industries usually have manual material handling system (MHS) for empty cement packaging bags, mostly these bags are the bought item from the vendors. In this industry also cement packaging bags are bought items which are received in the bunch of 300 bags whose approximate weight is around 24 kg. These bundles of empty cement packaging bags are manually stored in bag go-down room at different places according to respective categories. As per the requirement, a particular category of the bundle of cement packaging bag is unpacked and being consumed by the Roto-Packer cement filling machine. This machine is a very high-speed machine which packs around 3600 cement bags per hour. Hence, to feed empty cement packaging bags to this high-speed Roto-Packer cement filling machine a lot of manpower is used. To improve the productivity of the material handling system of the empty cement packaging bags, automatic material handling system is proposed in place of the manual material handling system. Hence, by upgrading the existing system from the proposed system we achieve a continuous flow of empty cement packaging bags form bag go-down room to Roto-Packer cement filling machine. To assist the problem mentioned above a fully Automated Guided Vehicle is design and developed, which can handle the flow of empty cement packaging bags automatically. This vehicle is capable to store a bunch of 1200 unit unpacked bags in bag go-down room as per their respective categories and could deliver it to Roto-Packer cement filling machine whenever required.