AGVs carry pallets, carts and components between stations without a driver. Classic designs follow a magnetic tape or an embedded wire; newer autonomous mobile robots use LiDAR and cameras to navigate free paths and avoid people. A fleet manager assigns tasks and routes, and the vehicles report position, battery level and faults continuously.
That coordination is where IoT matters. Dozens of vehicles need reliable, low-latency wireless coverage across a large hall, which is a common motivation for private 5G or carefully engineered Wi-Fi. The vehicles also integrate with the MES and warehouse systems so that a finished pallet is collected automatically. The trade-off is flexibility versus cost: tape-guided AGVs are cheap but hard to reroute, while free-navigating robots cost more and need a well-mapped environment. See the Industrial IoT guide.
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