With the recent progress in flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) in industry, increasing attention has been given to Automatic Guided Vehicle (AGV) systems. An AGV is a self-powered unit for transporting materials between stations without needing to be controlled by an operator. Such a system has several sensors to recognize the external state, and it is designed to travel between stations automatically without external assistance. To manage each device automatically in real time it requires a distributed controller with a main computer as the host, as well as a number of micro-controllers. In this study, an AGV system with dual motor drive was constructed. A Pentium 4 personal computer was set up as the main host for the distributed control, and this communicated with other micro-controllers in the management of the motor. The speed of each motor was also controlled by a micro-controller.
