Feasibility of Commodity WiFi for Operations Control in an Autonomous Production Site

Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) are increasingly being employed in logistics to carry out tiring and repetitive tasks inside large industrial buildings. In these settings, AGVs perform more efficiently than human workers in that they exhibit no signs of fatigue, their movements can be tracked automatically and their path can be timed to feed/collect objects in a quasi-predictable time frame and to even perform some object manipulations/refinement during transportation. In this article, we present a simulation analysis assessing the feasibility of commodity WiFi for operations control in an autonomous production site. In this context, AGVs and infrastructure endpoints are involved in periodic data exchange, the later gathering and acting upon AGV health data in order to ensure the systems operations continuity. To this end, we have setup a realistic simulation scenario mimicking the sites' operational environment discussing some trade-offs that emerge.