A design space for automated material handling vehicles

Alexander G Mirnig; Peter Fröhlich; Setareh Zafari; Michael Gafert; Lukas Kröninger; Manfred Tscheligi

doi:10.3389/frobt.2023.1276258

A design space for automated material handling vehicles

Front Robot AI. 2023 Dec 14:10:1276258. doi: 10.3389/frobt.2023.1276258. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Alexander G Mirnig^{1

2}, Peter Fröhlich¹, Setareh Zafari¹, Michael Gafert¹, Lukas Kröninger¹, Manfred Tscheligi^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Austrian Institute of Technology, Vienna, Austria.
² Artificial Intelligence and Human Interfaces, University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria.

Abstract

Material Handling Vehicles (loaders, excavators, forklifts, harvesters, etc.) have seen a strong increase in automation efforts in recent years. The contexts such vehicles operate in are frequently complex and due to the often very specific nature of industrial material handling scenarios, know-how is fragmented and literature is not as numerous as, for example, for passenger vehicle automation. In this paper, we present a contextual design space for automated material handling vehicles (AMHV), that is intended to inform context analysis and design activities across a wide spectrum of material handling use cases. It was developed on the basis of existing context and design spaces for vehicle and machine automation and extended via expert knowledge. The design space consists of separate context and interaction subspaces, that separately capture the situation and each individual point of interaction, respectively. Implications, opportunities, and limitations for the investigation and design of AMHV are discussed.

Keywords: design space; human in the loop; interaction design; material handling; vehicle automation.

Grants and funding

The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This work is part of the project AWARD, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101006817. The content of this paper reflects only the author’s view. Neither the European Commission nor CINEA is responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.