AGV Path Planning Calculator

An AGV mission is a round trip -- it travels from its pickup point to its destination and, in a typical dedicated-route setup, back again before starting the next load -- so this calculator doubles the one-way trip distance you enter to capture the full travel distance per cycle. If your actual AGV path only travels one way per load (with a different vehicle handling the return leg), halve your entered distance before using this calculator.

Utilization represents real-world losses that a pure travel-time calculation can't capture on its own -- waiting for a path to clear, minor conflicts with other AGVs sharing the same routes, and normal operational friction. Applying it as a multiplier on trips-per-hour derates the AGV's theoretical maximum capacity down to a more realistic sustained throughput, which is why a lower utilization value increases the number of AGVs this calculator recommends for the same required throughput.

The number of AGVs required is always rounded up to a whole vehicle, since a fleet can't include a fractional AGV. That rounding means the fleet's actual combined capacity, calculated from the rounded-up vehicle count, is typically somewhat higher than the bare minimum throughput you asked for -- the last AGV added to hit your requirement usually carries some spare capacity rather than landing exactly on your target.

No -- a single AGV's round-trip time is determined entirely by travel distance, AGV speed, and load/unload time, none of which depend on how many loads per hour the overall operation needs to move. Required throughput only affects how many AGVs the calculator recommends deploying to collectively meet that throughput, not how long any individual AGV's own trip cycle takes.