A system has been developed to facilitate hands-free autonomous control of material handling equipment or vehicles, such as forklifts and pallet trucks. The system has been designed to facilitate visual tracking by the automated vehicle and further facilitates voice commands. In some use cases, visual tracking is only used, and in other cases only voice commands are used. In other cases, both visual tracking and voice commands are used to control the material handling vehicle. For visual tracking, one or more cameras are configured to capture one or more images of a fiducial. In one case, the vehicle moves, turns, and/or stops based on the movement of the fiducial. For voice control, the operator provides voice commands via a voice controller. The voice controller converts the voice commands to vehicle control commands that are sent to a remote receiver unit (RRU) in the vehicle.

An automated carrier includes a towing vehicle and a towed vehicle towed by the towing vehicle. The towed vehicle includes a marker associated with specification information of the towed vehicle stored in a computer mounted on the towing vehicle or in an external computer communicating with the towing vehicle. The towing vehicle includes a camera and a controller. The camera acquires a marker image by capturing an area comprising the marker on the towed vehicle. The controller acquires the specification information of the towed vehicle from the computer based on the marker image, and controls a drive unit of the towing vehicle based on the acquired specification information of the towed vehicle.

A method and an apparatus for determining a position of a shelf are provided. The method may include: obtaining a number of automated guided vehicles with shelf scanning devices; determining, based on the number of the automated guided vehicles, a scanning area of a place to which each automated guided vehicle belongs; determining, based on the scanning area, a scanning route of the scanning area to which each automated guided vehicle belongs; transmitting the scanning route of the scanning area to which the automated guided vehicle belongs, to the automated guided vehicle; and determining a position of a shelf in the scanning area to which the automated guided vehicle belongs based on scanning information of a shelf scanning device on the automated guided vehicle and position information of the automated guided vehicle.

A control device includes: an acquisition unit configured to acquire a detection result by a detector, wherein the detector is mounted on a moving object movable by unmanned driving; a determination unit configured to determine a landmark to be detected by the detector, wherein the landmark is located outside the moving object; and a control unit configured to move the moving object by unmanned driving, wherein the control unit performs different processing for moving the moving object depending on whether or not the landmark determined by the determination unit is included in the detection result.