Cost Comparison

There are four main drivers of cost for most automated solutions. These are:

1. 1. Installation.
2. 2. Infrastructure.
3. 3. Navigation and mapping.
4. 4. Truck.

Traditional AGV
AGV manufacturers typically have a high manufacturing cost in the base chassis of their machines. The design is often bespoke for a particular application. Installation costs will usually reflect the complexity of the application, environment and the amount of infrastructure needed to support navigation.

Robotic Forklift Truck/AGV with traditional navigation
A number of manufacturers are now offering AGV products that are based on manual-driven models. The benefits of this are clear as these machines are often designed for mass-manufacture in larger numbers that the traditional AGV, bringing reliability, parts availability and in-field maintenance support. The vast majority utilises the same infrastructure-dependent navigation methods.

Yale Robotic Forklift Truck with Geonavigation
Yale Robotic Forklift trucks are based on manually-driven models. The key difference with Yale is the navigation and localisation method. With Geonavigation, physical infrastructure for navigation and localisation is simply not required, instead we rely on the existing physical environment within the application. This completely removes the infrastructure cost and reduces the cost of installation.