A flexible belt conveying system: self-organizing ofmicro-conveyor cells

Abstract Conveyor systems play an important role in material transportation in industries. For the problems of lacking belt conveying system for flexible organization and Automated Guided Vehicles (AGV) transportation system,this paper proposes a flexible architecture micro-conveyor cells self-organized system into a belt conveying system. This architecture combines the advantages of both AGVs transportation system and belt conveying system well. First, this paper give the definitions of micro-conveyor cell and micro-conveyor self-organization architecture. Then, the path segmentation and secondary programming algorithms of micro-conveyor cell and self-organization are given, and the theorem of path segmentation without secondary programming is proved.Based on the architecture, the mechanical structure of micro-conveyor with 2 levels belt conveyor, which satisfies the definition of micro-conveyor and made into prototype machine further, is designed. Finally, the above algorithms and theorem are verified by MATLAB simulation experiments and the experimental results show its effectiveness.