Page 9 - Agvs News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

>> silently making their way through the tunnels are 24 automated guided vehicles or agvs. around here, the they're more commonly referred to as robots. >> they transport thousands of meals, tons of laundry and countless supplies throughout a jail facility that's a half a mile in length and a quarter mile in width. while the system appears futuristic, it's actually more than two decades old. and was nearly doomed from the beginning. >> the company that installed the system went bankrupt after they installed it here at santa rita jail. so we went ahead and hired on some of their engineers and m...

Back online as soon as possible. >> this is kind of a dinosaur in the industry. you have to trouble shoot a lot. a lot of times electronics don't fail outright. they get glitchy, and it's had 23 years to get glitchy. >> senior agv technician bruce adams runs the workshop. >> the mechanical repair side of it is pretty solid. we have parts for that. it's basically the electronics that are obsolete. they don't make them anymore. we're doing constant maintenance. >> this is a pretty brutal environment for electronics. you can hear them bumping and grinding down the guide path over crumbling expans...

Battery area and go out for one service around the jail. and then they will return to the battery area to get a quick charge, usually about three minutes and it's ready to go. >> they deliver about 1,000 meals a day. this is a custom design that was designed specifically for the sheriff's department. and they're designed in this shape so they fit underneath the food carts. >> santa rita robots. this is how our meals are brought to us. >> some inmates even foresee a day when robots might just replace some other common fixtures at the jail. >> pretty soon they're going to have robots popping us ...

>> what they do is they deliver food, supplies, clothing, linen to the housing units here at santa rita jail. we're a half mile fence to fence, so it would take a lot of inmates, a lot of the inmate labor, deputies to supervise is the inmates to transport those items to the units so these robots do it for us. we're the only facility i know that actually has this kind of a system. it runs is 24 hours a day, seven days a week. >> the agvs utilize a wire guided navigation system which is built into two miles of track running between all the jail's housing units and service areas. the series of se...

>> silently making their way through the tunnels are 24 automated guided vehicles, or agvs. around here they're more commonly referred to as robots. >> they transport thousands of meals, tons of laundry and countless supplies throughout a jail facility that's a half a mile in length and a quarter mile in width. while the system appears futuristic, it's actually more than two decades old. and was nearly doomed from the beginning. >> the company that installed the system went bankrupt after they installed it here at santa rita jail. so we went ahead and hired on some of their engineers and maint...