Autonomous vehicle specialist Aurrigo has announced it has developed the world’s first autonomous baggage carrying dolly.
The Coventry-based company has been working with British Airways at London Heathrow Airport to test its self-driving dollies, which are now operating in the baggage handling area of Terminal 5.
“Until you have seen it first-hand, it’s difficult to explain how big an operation it is moving bags around an airport,” said Richard Fairchild, Operations Director of Aurrigo.
“In Terminal 5 alone, BA operates around 900 dollies. The current method is to have one manually driven tug towing three dollies behind. It can’t move until they are all full, which means there are a lot of empty dollies waiting around.”
The project started when International Airlines Group (IAG) approached Aurrigo to look at more efficient ways to transport luggage around airports using electric, autonomous vehicles.
The trial began in March with LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) and GPS technology fitted onto an existing dolly, with the stated aim of increasing the speed of loading and unloading luggage.
‘What IAG wanted to do was look at an alternative solution and that’s 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,” said Fairchild.
“Better still, this means that each dolly can move on its own and doesn’t 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,” he concluded.
Aurrigo say they will now undertake a worldwide marketing programme to discuss with airports and airlines the benefits of retrofitting existing dollies to make them fully autonomous.
