The event was part of this year's TEST CAMP Intralogistics of the IFOY Award. Production under Industry 4.0 conditions requires smooth communication between machines. This also applies to driverless transport vehicles from different manufacturers that are used in the internal material flow. Standardized communication between these vehicles is significantly simplified by VDA 5050. The communication interface makes it possible to combine different vehicles under any control system using a standardized data language. During the first live test in Dortmund, vehicles from arculus, DS Automotion, Safelog, Siemens AG, SSI Schäfer and Still drove together in a KION Group control system. "This was the first major practical test for the interface to show how the transmission of orders and status data via VDA 5050 works. The test scenario in Dortmund ran reliably over four days and the companies involved were able to try out different details for the vehicles. We are already thinking about continuing the AGV Mesh-Up," explains Andreas Scherb, responsible for the Automated Guided Vehicles department at the VDMA Materials Handling and Intralogistics Association.
VDA 5050 is available with the revision number 1.1. and represents the current interim status. In future, a further version will also describe the assured compatibility of PLC-based automated guided vehicle systems. The so-called AGV Mesh-Up from the VDMA Materials Handling and Intralogistics Association celebrated its world premiere at the IFOY AWARD as part of the TEST CAMP Intralogistics in Dortmund. The name is based on a mesh WLAN, in which different components interlock and are seen as a uniform WLAN. For the vehicles, this means that they drive with different types of navigation (e.g. line-guided or contour-based), but communicate with the higher-level control system in a common data language.

Background
The interface project was realized by a team of AGV users and AGV manufacturers under the coordination of the German Association of the Automotive Industry (VDA) and the VDMA Materials Handling and Intralogistics Association. The aim is to enable automated transport vehicles, such as tugger trains, AGVs or mobile robots, to interact with each other via the master control system using plug-and-play, regardless of the manufacturer or system.