Automated guided vehicles
The VDA 5050 standard
The VDMA and VDA associations have jointly developed an interface, the VDA 5050, so that driverless transport systems, or AGVs for short, can work together in intralogistics and production environments.
It has been used to network different vehicles from different manufacturers since 2019.
VDA 5050 is an interface for communication between automated guided vehicles (AGVs) and a control system. According to the VDA recommendation, the aim is to "simplify the connection of new vehicles to an existing control station and thus the integration into an existing automated guided vehicle system (AGV) for use in the automotive industry and to enable parallel operation with AGVs from different manufacturers and conventional systems (existing systems) in the same working environment".
Under the coordination of the German Association of the Automotive Industry VDA and the VDMA Materials Handling and Intralogistics Association and with the support of the KIT Institute for Materials Handling and Logistics Systems IFL, the interface was further developed and version 2.0.0 was introduced at the beginning of the year. The new version defines the necessary and optional parameters for an automated guided vehicle (AGV) (factsheet), which must be communicated to the control system by the AGV in advance. In addition to changes to the order acceptance logic and adjustments to the mandatory spelling of enumerations, corrections have also been made to the permitted characters and field lengths.
The VDA recommendation "Interface for communication between automated guided vehicles (AGVs) and a control system - VDA 5050 Version 2.0.0, January 2022" describes the communication interface for automated guided vehicles. In addition to requirements and protocol definitions, the process and content of communication and protocol specifications, the authors provide practical examples and summarize the terminology in a glossary. You can download the recommendation here.
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