It is important to track indoor forklifts, carts, AGVs, and other vehicles for various purposes:
Some key functionalities for forklifts and vehicles:
Natural questions arise immediately:
There are several basic questions that shall be answered when choosing the equipment:
Overall, it is the best and the safest choice when you are not sure what to choose or what exact experiments you will run, but you want to have the most straightforward solution with the greatest flexibility and the greatest performance at the same time.
Configuration:
The easiest and recommended configuration consists of Super-Beacons-Outdoor and Modem-Outdoor.
The least expensive configuration:
You will get 2D tracking in one submap with a maximum distance.
Industrial Super-Beacons and Super-Modem are recommended when you have to operate indoors and outdoors, work with temperatures below 0C (Industrial beacons do not have embedded batteries that could fail in sub-zero temperatures), or need industrial connectivity such as RS485 or CAN.
Recommended minimum configuration:
Super-Modem is undoubtedly more powerful, having industrial interfaces (RS485) and better protected than Modem v5.1. Super-Modem even has WiFi inside.
However, Super-Modem is more complex to use:
Therefore, particularly at the beginning, we recommend using Modem v5.1-Outdoor instead of Super-Modem. And later – when you become more familiar – you can easily switch to the Super-Modem.
The industrial environment is often radio propagation unfriendly:
Therefore, we recommend using full-size antennas. They can’t solve radio problems but minimize the chances of having them.
In some cases, special directional antennas on the modem side or the farther-end beacons can be recommended.
For even larger cases, we recommend Multi-Modem configurations. Each Super-Modem is responsible for its map. And they send their data to a Super-Super-Modem that unites maps into a super-map that the end user sees as a seamless map. See more about the Multi-Modem configurations in the Presentation.
The picture above depicts how the track is seen in our Dashboard. However, customers typically integrate our location data into their own graphical user interface (GUI) or warehouse management system (WMS). It is straightforward to do using the available API.
Even easier it is when the Super-Modem is used as a modem. The location data is streamed via UDP over WiFi to your fixed IP address anywhere in the world. Overthere the data is taken using our open protocols and shown in your WMS or GUI.
Setup:
Contact us via info@marvelmind.com with any questions