Hands free advance control for material handling vehicle

Abstract

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.