736 IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL, VOL. 18, NO. 2, JANUARY 15, 2018 Sensor Integration-Based Approach for Automatic Fork Lift Trucks T. Muthuramalingam , M. Mohamed Rabik , D. Saravanakumar , and K. Jaswanth Abstract—In the industrial environment, the flow of materials is a complex and very expensive process. For reducing the expenses, it requires an effort to find favorable and flexible systems. Fork lift trucks are widely used in industries for transfer actions. The complexity of manually operated fork lift trucks shall be reduced by low cost automation. This paper deals with sensor interfaced automatic fork lifter for the effective materials flow. This fork-lift truck will identify the different pallets automatically based upon their surface color by the color sensor interfaced with it. The digital output of the color sensor varies with respect to the wavelength of the color. This output decides the selection or rejection of the pallets for loading as well as unloading anywhere. Line following technique is used for transportation between sections to avoid the complexity of conventional memory mapping technique. Index Terms—Color sensor, IR sensor, line following technique ultrasonic sensor. I. I NTRODUCTION I N MOST of the industries, manually controlled fork lift trucks are used for carrying the components. The loading and unloading of components are done purely through manual control which consume more cost and time. The proposed sensor based automatic fork lifter will reduce this operating cost. In Laser scanner based approach, it is not possible to place reflector marks in all fields of activity. This color sensor interfaced trucks will reduce the complexity of laser scanning based pallet pick-up [1], [2]. In contrast to camera-based systems for identifying variable pallets, color sensor based fork lifting truck is independent of luminance conditions that can be highly variable in industrial environments [3], [4]. This work facilitates the loading/unloading of variable pallet pick up by color sensor and transportation of automatic fork lifter using line following technique Line following technique reduces the complexity of the memory mapping algorithms for path detec- tion [5]–[7]. Hence by having an array of IR sensors the robot can be made to follow a particular line easily. By identifying the color of the pallets by color sensor, the required pallets can be easily identified and loading/unloading of those pallets can be done. Manuscript received November 8, 2017; revised November 22, 2017; accepted November 22, 2017. Date of publication November 27, 2017; date of current version December 21, 2017. The associate editor coordinating the review of this paper and approving it for publication was Prof. Kazuaki Sawada. (Corresponding author: T. Muthuramalingam.) T. Muthuramalingam, M. M. Rabik, and K. Jaswanth are with the Department of Mechatronics Engineering, SRM University, Kattankulathur 603203, India (e-mail: muthu1060@gmail.com; m.rabik@ gmail.com; jaswanthkolla96@gmail.com). D. Saravanakumar is with the School of Mechanical and Building Sciences, VIT University, Chennai 600127, India (e-mail: saravanapoy@gmail.com). Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JSEN.2017.2777880 Fig. 1. Layout of a model plant. II. AUTOMATIC FORK LIFTING TRUCK The main objective of the present work is to design and fabricate a low cost fully sensor based automatic fork lifter for efficient material handling. In this work, a prototype model of automatic fork lifter like the real time module has been fabricated to meet the aim of the paper. The main three works have to be done by automatic fork lifting trucks are trans- portation, required pallet identification and obstacle detection. TCS230 programmable color light-to-frequency converter has been used to sense the required color of different pallets. It has been attached with lifting rods of the truck. Line following technique has been used for guiding the path with the help of IR sensors. Two pairs of IR sensor module have been connected in front of the truck. They have been made to face the defined path for path detection. PIR sensor modules have been used for the obstacle detection. Because the truck should have not been impinged with anywhere.Figure.1 shows the layout of the model plant. The path between two required sections can be derived by the any form of the IR path. It may be the straight line, curve, ellipse and so on. The color of the line should be black or white. The side view and front view of fabricated mechanical arrangement is shown in Figure.2 with dimensions in mm and dimension ratio is 1:10. It shows where all the sensors have been arranged in the fork lifting trucks. Figure.3 shows the fork lifter arrangement only itself separately with all the parts of it. In real time automatic fork lifter, the movement of fork lifting arrangement is being obtained either by electrical actuators or hydraulic actuators. In the proposed work a spindle screw has been fitted with one permanent magnet DC motor for obtaining fork lifting movement in the fork lifter as in the figure.3. For guiding the fork lifter rod, it has been connected with two guiding rod. Two fork lifter hands have 1558-1748 © 2017 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission. See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.