AGV SLAM & Navigation Patents: Top Companies & Trends 2026
- Filing activity peaked in 2021 at 34 records and has declined since, with 2026 sitting at 4 filings on a partial year — the claim rush for this generation of navigation approaches has already crested.
- China accounts for 88 of the tracked receiving-office filings more than the United States (51) and Europe (28) combined, making CN prior art the first place to search before drafting new claims.
- Only 3 co-assignee pairs appear in the entire dataset meaning most applicants file solo — cross-company joint development in this space is the exception, not the norm.
Filing growth compares 2021 (34 records) with 2024 (12) — 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 257 records in scope (CR5), not by the ranked leaders only.
What this landscape covers
This dataset tracks 257 patent families filed between 2015 and 2026 that combine automated guided vehicle (AGV) hardware claims with localization and navigation methods — simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), LiDAR-based SLAM, autonomous navigation, and natural feature navigation. The search restricts to G05D1/02, G01C21/16 and G01S17, the IPC classes that cover non-electric variable control, navigation/gyroscope instruments, and radar/sonar positioning respectively — the three technical layers an AGV needs to know where it is and where to go next.
Filing activity is concentrated in the control layer: G05D appears on 215 of the 257 records, far ahead of the sensing classes G01C and G01S. That concentration says claim space around vehicle-level control logic is heavily occupied, while the underlying sensing and fusion methods carry comparatively less density.
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Filing trends and technology composition
Two views of the same 257 families: how filing volume has moved year over year, and which IPC subclasses carry the claim density.
A peak already behind us
Filings rose from 20 in 2017 to a peak of 34 in 2021, held near that level through the 2022 midpoint (26), and have since fallen to 4 in the partial 2026 year. Publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so the last one to two years will always look thinner than they eventually turn out to be — but the multi-year decline from 2021 predates that lag effect.
Control logic dominates the class mix
G05D (control of non-electric variables) appears on 215 of 257 records, more than triple the next class. G01C (navigation/gyroscopes, 65) and G01S (radar/sonar/positioning, 55) trail well behind, and G06Q, B65G, B66F, G05B and G06K each appear on fewer than 30 records — these adjacent classes cover fleet scheduling, material handling integration, lifting mechanisms and vision-based recognition layered onto the core navigation claims.
Shares are the percentage of the 257 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 SLAM and Navigation with Eureka
This page is one run against one query. Ask Eureka your own question about automated guided vehicle slam and navigation and every answer comes back with the patent numbers behind it.
Try EurekaRepresentative filing and most-cited prior art
US9244463B2 — Automated guided vehicle and method of operating an automated guided vehicle
The invention relates to an automated guided vehicle and a method for operating an automated guided vehicle. Upon arriving at a destination, then the automated guided vehicle is moved, based on a comparison of signals or data assigned to the environment detected by at least one sensor with signals or data which are assigned to a target position or to a target position and orientation of the automated guided vehicle at the destination, such that the actual position or the actual position and orientation is the same as the target position or target position and orientation at least within a pre-specified tolerance.Filed by KUKA Laboratories GmbH, published 2016-01-26 — an early sensor-comparison approach to final-position correction that predates the SLAM-heavy filings clustered around the 2021 peak.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US20180137454A1 | Autonomous Multimodal Logistics | 227 |
| 2 | US20180127212A1 | Hybrid Modular Storage Fetching System | 201 |
| 3 | CN105607635A | 自动导引车全景光学视觉导航控制系统及全向自动导引车 | 152 |
| 4 | US5281901A | Downward compatible AGV system and methods | 149 |
| 5 | US5650703A | Downward compatible AGV system and methods | 138 |
| 6 | US5341130A | Downward compatible AGV system and methods | 130 |
| 7 | US20180096299A1 | Hybrid Modular Storage Fetching System | 83 |
| 8 | US20200207250A1 | Automated Loading of Delivery Vehicles Using Automated Guided Vehicles | 56 |
| 9 | US20200209865A1 | Automated Preparation of Deliveries in Delivery Vehicles Using Automated Guided Vehicles | 52 |
| 10 | US20170176999A1 | Distributed Celling-Mounted Smart Cameras for Multi-Unmanned Gound Vehicle Routing and Coordination | 48 |
Citation counts favour older records simply because they have had longer to accumulate citations inside this corpus; treat them as a signal of influence on the field, not as a ranking of current commercial 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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Reading the trend and the class composition together points to where claim space is crowded and where it has already thinned out.
The rush has crested
Filings climbed steadily to a 2021 peak, held near that level through 2022, then declined. Combined with a data cut-off that understates the last 18 months, the honest read is a technology past its first wave of claim-staking rather than one still accelerating.
China is the primary filing venue
China alone accounts for more receiving-office filings than the US and Europe combined. Any freedom-to-operate check for AGV navigation claims that skips Chinese-language prior art is working with an incomplete picture.
Control logic is the crowded layer
Vehicle-level control claims dominate the corpus. Sensing classes (G01C, G01S) and adjacent operational classes (G06Q, B65G, B66F, G06K) sit at a fraction of that density, suggesting fusion and scheduling logic are less picked-over than core control claims.
Filing is overwhelmingly solo
Only three co-assignee pairs appear across 257 families, all involving the same corporate applicant paired with different individual co-inventors. Joint filings between separate companies are essentially absent from this landscape.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to automated guided vehicle slam and navigation, with the prior art for and against each one.
Who is active, and where the gate sits
Recent-year momentum has gone flat across several named assignees, and only three cross-company co-filing pairs exist in the whole dataset — a landscape of largely independent filers rather than an alliance structure.
Named assignees have gone quiet
Multiple previously active assignees show zero filings in the latest tracked year. That is consistent with the overall post-2021 decline rather than any single company's retreat, but it means recent activity is not evenly spread across the historical leaderboard.
Cross-filing is rare and narrow
The only repeated co-assignee pattern pairs one corporate applicant with individual named inventors, appearing twice each. There is no evidence in this dataset of joint filing programmes between competing companies.
Filing is genuinely multi-jurisdictional
Beyond the China/US/Europe concentration, Japan (27), WIPO/PCT (18) and India (15) all carry meaningful filing counts, indicating applicants are pursuing protection across several major markets rather than a single home jurisdiction.
| Assignee | Recent year | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| Staples, Inc. | 0 | — |
| Wipro Limited | 0 | — |
| Honda Motor Co., Ltd. | 0 | — |
| Meidensha Corporation | 0 | — |
| Yale-Conway Ltd. | 0 | — |
| DMG Mori Seiki Co., Ltd. | 0 | — |
| ABB (Switzerland) Ltd. | 0 | — |
| NAVFLEX INC | 0 | — |
Where to take this analysis
The dataset points to where to look next, not to a finished conclusion.
Check Chinese-language prior art directly
With 88 of the tracked filings routed through China, any claim drafted around AGV navigation should be checked against CN full-text prior art rather than translated abstracts alone.
Search this landscape in EurekaMap the sensing and fusion sub-classes in detail
G01C and G01S together sit well below G05D in filing density. A closer subclass-level breakdown of fusion and re-localization methods can show whether that gap is real white space or simply under-tagged filings.
Run a deeper IPC breakdown in EurekaTrack the post-2021 decline by assignee
Several named assignees show zero filings in the latest year. Pulling per-assignee trend lines separates a genuine pullback from a data cut-off artifact.
Build an assignee trend view in EurekaCommon questions about this landscape
The core classes are G05D1/02 (control of non-electric variables, covering vehicle-level control logic), G01C21/16 (navigation instruments and gyroscopes), and G01S17 (radar, sonar and LiDAR-based positioning). In this dataset G05D appears on 215 of 257 records, making it by far the most heavily filed class, while G01C (65) and G01S (55) cover the sensing side. Adjacent classes like G06Q, B65G and B66F show up when navigation claims are bundled with fleet scheduling, material handling or lifting mechanisms.
No — filings rose from 20 in 2017 to a peak of 34 in 2021, held near that level through 2022 (26), and have declined since, down to 4 in the partial 2026 year. Because publication typically lags filing by around 18 months, the most recent one to two years will always look artificially thin. But the decline visible from 2021 onward is too large and too early to be explained by lag alone, pointing to a genuine slowdown in new claim-staking after the initial wave.
China leads with 88 tracked receiving-office filings, ahead of the United States (51), the European Patent Office (28), Japan (27), the WIPO/PCT route (18) and India (15). That means China alone accounts for more filings than the US and Europe combined, so any competitive or freedom-to-operate review of this space needs to include Chinese-language patent literature directly rather than relying on English-language databases.
Overwhelmingly alone. This dataset contains only three co-assignee pairs across 257 patent families, and each of those pairs links one corporate applicant with an individual named inventor rather than two separate companies. There is no visible pattern of joint-development filing programmes between competing AGV manufacturers in this landscape.
US9244463B2, filed by KUKA Laboratories GmbH and published in January 2016, claims a method of correcting an AGV's final position and orientation at a destination by comparing sensor-detected environmental data against a stored target position within a specified tolerance. It represents an earlier, sensor-comparison approach to precision docking that predates the SLAM-centric filings clustered around the 2021 peak in this dataset. Anyone building final-approach position correction into a commercial AGV should review this claim scope specifically, since it sits upstream of many later navigation refinements rather than being superseded by them.
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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.
Nothing on this page constitutes an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate, or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial, investment, or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Any patent, commercial, or strategic decision should be verified independently and reviewed with qualified patent, legal, and domain professionals. Patsnap makes no warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose of the information presented.
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.