Low Cost PLC Uninterrupted Power Supply for use on AGVs with a Removable Battery Banks

When it comes to electrical AGVs, downtime due to charging batteries is a significant hurdle. This is often dealt with in numerous ways; including opportunistic charging, mobile charging, quick charging, etc. This paper will focus on the difficulties of using exchangeable "power units", which entails making the entire battery system (including the battery management system) removable from the host machine. This eliminates downtime, due to charging, as the entire power plant is replaced with a "fresh" one. The depleted power unit can then be recharged at a sustainable (from a battery lifespan perspective) rate. The major disadvantage of this strategy is that with the power plant removed from the AGV, all control systems are unpowered thus deactivated. Hence the focus of this paper on creating a "control system UPS" to keep the control systems powered even when the main power unit is down and thus solving one of the major problems with a removable battery system.