Automated Guided Vehicle Sensor Integration Patent Landscape 2026
- Filing peaked in 2021 at 13 records and has since fallen back toward single digits, so the claim space is not still expanding — it is settling.
- China accounts for 20 of 31 receiving-office filings against 2 apiece for Europe, Taiwan and the US, making CN prior art the first place to search before drafting.
- Only 2 co-assignee pairs exist across 31 families which means this is still a field of solo filers, not consortiums — a first-mover in a joint claim has room to set terms.
Filing growth compares 2021 (13 records) with 2024 (4) — a three-year span. 2024 is the most recent year we treat as complete: publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so 2025 onwards are still filling in and any growth rate that ends there would understate the field. Top-5 share is the combined record count of the five largest assignees divided by all 31 records in scope (CR5), not by the ranked leaders only.
What this landscape covers
This landscape tracks patent families that combine automated guided vehicle platforms with multi-sensor claims — LiDAR-camera-IMU stacks, safety sensor integration, and sensor fusion for navigation. The search is scoped to G05D1/02, G01D21/02 and G01S17, which keeps the set focused on control and ranging rather than the broader AGV mechanical or logistics literature.
The dataset holds 31 published families from 2015 through the 2026-07-31 cut-off. Because publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, the 2025 and 2026 counts in any trend chart understate real filing activity and should not be read as a slowdown on their own.
Filing trend and technology composition
Two views of the same 31 families: how filing volume has moved year on year, and which IPC subclasses carry the claim weight.
Filing trend, 2017–2026
Filings rose from zero in 2017 to a peak of 13 in 2021, then dropped to 2 by the 2022 midpoint — a flat-to-declining pattern rather than sustained growth, though the final two years are undercounted due to publication lag.
IPC subclass distribution
G05D (control of non-electric variables) dominates with 21 records, followed by G01C (navigation and gyroscopes) at 13 and G01S (radar, sonar and positioning) at 12. Smaller counts in A01K, B62D, G01J, G06K and G06T mark peripheral applications — animal husbandry vehicles, steering integration and vision processing — that sit outside the core control-and-ranging claim set.
Shares are the percentage of the 31 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
Go deeper on Automated Guided Vehicle Sensor Integration with Eureka
This page is one run against one query. Ask Eureka your own question about automated guided vehicle sensor integration and every answer comes back with the patent numbers behind it.
Try EurekaMost-cited records and a representative filing
Modular control system and method for controlling automated guided vehicle
A modular control system for controlling an AGV includes an interface, a processor, a memory, and a plurality of programs. The plurality of programs include a task scheduling module, a sensor fusion module, a mapping module, and a localization module. The interface receives a command signal from an AGV management system and sensor signals from a plurality of sensors. The memory stores a surrounding map and the plurality of programs to be executed by the processor. The task scheduling module converts the command signal to generate an enabling signal. The sensor fusion module processes the received sensor signals according to the enabling signal and generates an organized sensor data. The mappFiled by Delta Electronics Int'l (Singapore) Pte Ltd, published 2023-01-05 as US20230004170A1.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | CN104166400A | 基于多传感器融合的视觉导引AGV系统 | 48 |
| 2 | CN113776519A | 一种无光动态开放环境下AGV车辆建图与自主导航避障方法 | 21 |
| 3 | US20230137089A1 | Method for Controlling an Automatic Guided Vehicle and Control System Adapted to Execute the Method | 15 |
| 4 | CN113218384A | 一种基于激光SLAM的室内AGV自适应定位系统 | 9 |
| 5 | CN113519431A | 一种工厂化水产养殖无轨道式智能导航投饲机 | 7 |
| 6 | CN117405107A | 一种基于多传感器融合的AGV实时定位方法 | 6 |
| 7 | WO2021170852A1 | Method for controlling an automatic guided vehicle and control system adapted to execute the method | 5 |
| 8 | CN119375875A | 一种多传感器融合的户外AGV极端天气下的安全防护方法 | 4 |
| 9 | CN114019968A | 一种基于多传感器融合的AGV避障控制系统及方法 | 4 |
| 10 | CN214846390U | 基于自动导引小车的动态环境避障系统 | 4 |
Citation counts inside this corpus skew toward older filings — CN104166400A, first in the table, is a decade-plus old and has had the longest time to accumulate citations. Read the ranking as a map of influence, not of current relevance.
Patent titles are shown in the language they were filed in, not translated, so that each record stays verifiable against the original filing — a translated title will not match in Eureka or in any national register. Each row carries its publication number; clicking a row searches Eureka by that number.
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Browse MCP servers →What the numbers say about this field
Three signals stand out once the filing trend, IPC split and citation pattern are read together.
A single peak year, not a growth curve
Filing built steadily from 2017, peaked at 13 records in 2021, then fell sharply. That shape reads as one wave of claim-staking around modular sensor-fusion architectures rather than an accelerating field — later years are still lagging in publication, but the drop from peak is too steep to be explained by lag alone.
Control-layer claims outweigh sensing-layer claims
G05D holds more than two-thirds of the records, with G01C and G01S trailing. That ordering suggests most applicants claim the control and navigation logic that consumes sensor output, while claims on the sensing hardware itself — the G01J and G06T counts are small — are comparatively rare.
China is the primary prior-art venue
Twenty of 31 filings route through the Chinese receiving office, against two each for Europe, Taiwan and the US. A freedom-to-operate search that skips CNIPA prior art on this topic is searching a fifth of the field.
A field of solo filers
Only two co-assignee pairs appear across the whole set, one linking a Dalian equipment developer with a marine research institute, the other a Singapore electronics unit with a Singapore university. Joint filing is the exception, not the norm, here.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to automated guided vehicle sensor integration, with the prior art for and against each one.
| Assignee | Co-assignee | Shared families |
|---|---|---|
| Dalian Huixin Titanium Equipment Development Co., Ltd. | Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences | 2 |
| Delta Electronics Int'l (Singapore) Pte Ltd | Nanyang Technological University | 1 |
The strongest pairing, Dalian Huixin Titanium Equipment Development Co., Ltd. with Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, points to aquaculture-vehicle navigation as a niche where academic-industry co-filing already exists — a template other applicant pairs in this space have not yet followed.
Who holds the claim space
Assignee activity in this dataset is thin at the top and flat in the most recent year — no single filer shows growth, and several show declines.
Even the most active filers have gone quiet
Siasun Robot & Automation Co., Ltd. shows a -100% year-on-year change with zero filings in the latest year, matching the pattern across every assignee tracked for momentum: NAVFLEX INC, Delta Electronics Int'l (Singapore) Pte Ltd, Zhejiang Jingjiu Technology Co., Ltd., Dalian Huixin Titanium Equipment Development Co., Ltd. and Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences all show zero in the latest year.
One of the few non-China filers with a modular architecture claim
Delta Electronics Int'l (Singapore) sits among the small US/EPO/Taiwan cohort, and its modular control system — task scheduling, sensor fusion, mapping and localization as separate modules — is the most citation-relevant non-China filing in the set.
Aquaculture AGVs pair industry with research institutes
Dalian Huixin Titanium Equipment Development Co., Ltd. and Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences file jointly on aquaculture navigation equipment, the strongest co-assignee link in the dataset — a rare case of an applicant pair building shared prior art rather than filing solo.
| Assignee | Recent year | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| NAVFLEX INC | 0 | — |
| Delta Electronics Int'l (Singapore) Pte Ltd | 0 | — |
| Zhejiang Jingjiu Technology Co., Ltd. | 0 | — |
| Siasun Robot & Automation Co., Ltd. | 0 | -100% |
| Dalian Huixin Titanium Equipment Development Co., Ltd. | 0 | — |
| Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences | 0 | — |
| Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences | 0 | — |
| Chongqing Vocational Institute of Engineering | 0 | — |
Where to take this
The filing pattern here is a starting point for a claims review, not a conclusion on its own.
Check freedom-to-operate against the CNIPA majority
With 20 of 31 filings routed through China, a clearance search that stops at EPO or USPTO prior art will miss most of the field's active claim territory.
Run a China-first FTO searchMap the G05D control-layer claims before drafting
Two-thirds of records sit in the control-of-non-electric-variables subclass; a new sensor-fusion control claim needs to be checked against this block specifically, not the sensing-hardware literature.
Compare against G05D prior artWatch the under-claimed sensing-hardware gates
G01J and G06T each carry only 2 records, well behind the control-layer subclasses — that gap is where a hardware-level sensor claim has the most room to stand alone.
Explore the white-space gatesCommon questions on AGV sensor-integration patents
This landscape identifies 31 patent families published between 2015 and the 2026-07-31 data cut-off, scoped to AGV platforms combined with multi-sensor claims under IPC classes G05D1/02, G01D21/02 and G01S17. That is a narrow, control-and-ranging-focused slice of the broader AGV literature, not a count of every AGV-related filing. Because publication lags filing by around 18 months, the true number of filings from the last one to two years will be higher than currently shown.
Filing volume rose from zero records in 2017 to a peak of 13 in 2021, then fell to 2 by the 2022 midpoint. That drop is steeper than publication lag alone would explain, suggesting a wave of claim-staking around modular sensor-fusion architectures that has since tapered rather than a field still accelerating. Anyone benchmarking against this trend should treat 2021 as an outlier peak, not a baseline to extrapolate from.
China's receiving office accounts for 20 of the 31 filings in this dataset, far ahead of Europe, Taiwan and the United States at 2 each. A freedom-to-operate or novelty search that does not cover Chinese-language filings will miss roughly two-thirds of the documented prior art in this specific technology combination. This is true even for applicants who intend to commercialise outside China, since CNIPA filings can still anticipate later claims elsewhere.
US20230004170A1, assigned to Delta Electronics Int'l (Singapore) Pte Ltd and published 2023-01-05, describes a modular AGV control system built from separate task scheduling, sensor fusion, mapping and localization program modules that process sensor signals received through a defined interface. It is one of the few non-China-filed records in this dataset and is useful as a reference architecture for how a modular sensor-fusion control stack can be claimed. Anyone designing a similar modular control system should review its module boundaries closely before finalising claim language.
Yes, based on IPC distribution: G05D (control logic) holds 21 of 31 records and G01C and G01S add 13 and 12 respectively, while sensing-hardware-adjacent classes like G01J (radiation and light measurement) and G06T (image processing) hold only 2 records each. That imbalance means control-layer sensor-fusion logic is comparatively crowded, while hardware-level calibration, safety-sensor fusion for personnel detection, and vision-inertial fusion claims remain thinly filed. A first claim aimed at one of those thinner classes is less likely to run into dense prior art than a general sensor-fusion control claim.
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Disclaimer. This page is generated from Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent and scientific-literature records, and is provided for general information and reference only.
Patent data carries inherent limitations: recent filings (typically the most recent 18–24 months) are under-counted due to standard publication lag; counts may be reported at either a patent-family or a patent-record basis and are not always directly comparable; classification, applicant-name, and citation data may contain errors, duplicates, or omissions; and the underlying search query defines and constrains the scope shown. As a result, the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
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Machine translation. Assignee and organisation names originally recorded in Chinese, Japanese or Korean have been rendered into English by an AI translation step so that the tables stay readable. These renderings are best-effort and may not match a company’s registered English name; the original name is what the underlying patent record carries, and it is what any Eureka query launched from this page uses.