The聽world’s first autonomous baggage carrying ‘dolly’ has been created by Aurrigo to speed up loading and unloading times.
The company was approached by International Airlines Group (IAG) to use its driverless expertise to develop the world鈥檚 first autonomous baggage carrying dolly.
The trial started in March and has seen an existing dolly converted using LIDAR and GPS technology into a self-driving, electric vehicle that promises to increase the speed of loading and unloading luggage at airports throughout the world.
Working with British Airways (BA), the adapted dolly has been moving around Terminal 5 at Heathrow Airport and is now also operating in the baggage handling area.
Designed, developed and manufactured at Aurrigo鈥檚 advanced engineering centre in Coventry, the firm will now embark on a global marketing programme to talk to the world鈥檚 airports and airlines about retrofitting existing dollies to make them fully autonomous and to explore production of a new range of super lightweight versions for extended operational performance.
鈥淯ntil you have seen it first-hand, it鈥檚 difficult to explain how big an operation it is moving bags around an airport. In Terminal 5 alone, BA operates around 900 dollies,鈥� explained Richard Fairchild, operations director of Aurrigo.
鈥淭he current method is to have one manually driven tug towing three dollies behind. It can鈥檛 move until they are all full, which means there are a lot of empty dollies waiting around.鈥�
He continued: 鈥淲hat IAG wanted to do was look at an alternative solution and that鈥檚 where we came in, using knowledge gained from our hugely successful Pod Zero passenger carrying vehicle to turn a standard dolly into a self-driving vehicle capable of moving bags from the baggage hall to the aircraft stand.
鈥淏etter still, this means that each dolly can move on its own and doesn鈥檛 need to wait for all three to be loaded, providing greater flexibility and speed of loading, not to mention reducing the need to maintain such a huge fleet of dollies and tugs. A massive win-win for airports and airlines.鈥�
Aurrigo and IAG say they’re delighted with the initial results and are looking at ways where they can roll this technology out so that it becomes an integral part of any 鈥榝uture airport鈥�.
A successful trial of the technology as part of a live service will confirm that autonomous dollies can be used safely airside to deliver a whole host of cost and efficiency savings.
David Keene, chief executive officer of Aurrigo, concluded: 鈥淥ur driverless pods are now in operation all around the world and the work with IAG and BA shows how similar technology can be used in a completely different industry to deliver significant results.
鈥淲e are now exploring different ways where we can create the production line and supply chain to rapidly build thousands of these autonomous dollies. The world really is our oyster on this one.鈥�