Crown Equipment Corporation has announced a major upgrade to its TSP series very-narrow-aisle (VNA) turret trucks, incorporating the "Auto-Fence LiDAR" system and an "AGV-Ready Navigation Handoff" interface designed for the growing semi-automated warehouse market. In high-density VNA facilities with aisles as narrow as 1.6 meters, the turret truck must operate at maximum precision to prevent rack strikes. Traditional wire-guidance systems use an electromagnetic sensor under the truck to follow a floor-embedded guide wire, but they do not reliably detect rack-end conditions, floor wire splices, or obstructions at the aisle ends-leaving the operator to manually transition between automated wire guidance and free-ranging manual travel in cross-aisles.
The Auto-Fence LiDAR system adds "360-Degree Solid-State LiDAR Scanners" to the truck's front and rear bumper guards. The engineering breakthrough is the "Wire-Guidance/LiDAR Fusion Logic." While traveling in the guided aisle, the wire-guidance sensor provides lateral steering control, but the LiDAR simultaneously builds a 3D map of the racking uprights, load beams, and floor conditions. If the LiDAR detects a rack upright bent inward beyond a safety threshold, or a foreign object on the floor inside the aisle, the system instantly halts travel and prevents the wire-guidance system from steering the truck into the hazard.
Furthermore, the "AGV-Ready Navigation Handoff" interface allows the turret truck to operate in three distinct modes: fully manual (operator-controlled), semi-automated (wire-guided with operator-controlled travel speed and lift), and fully autonomous (AGV mode), where the truck receives transport orders from the warehouse management system and navigates cross-aisles using LiDAR-based Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). The seamless mode-transition is the key innovation-when the truck exits the guided aisle into a cross-aisle, the system automatically switches to LiDAR navigation without requiring the operator to disengage the wire-guidance selector, eliminating the costly aisle-end collisions that historically occurred during the manual transition.
