At a time when many are focused on centralized control and coordination of materials handling activities, Dr. Ram Pai is going against the crowd. At a recent meeting of Material Handling Industry of America, the director of advanced technology at Rockwell Automation (www.rockwellautomation.com) was talking about autonomous control of automatic guided vehicles (AGVs) and other equipment.

Take a simple distributed control system with just three nodes, each with three settings, he started. "Changes in equipment status, product and process require as many as 27 different settings," he said. In other words, central control of even simple systems becomes complex quite quickly.

Enter autonomous control. Pai's concept, and it's nowhere near product stage yet, is to decentralize control, placing it directly on-board an AGV, for instance.

The envisioned system would allow each AGV to plan its route independently of central control. But there would be cooperation with AGVs negotiating to determine which vehicle is best suited to a particular job at a particular time. The AGVs would also exhibit adaptive behavior to change routes, pickup points and delivery points as requirements change.

"This is a level above even distributed controls systems," Pai said. "It is loosely coupled, flexible automation that is easy to expand and delivers predictable behavior to unanticipated events."