Driverless Forklifts

Although driverless forklifts have been around for about 30 years, it's only in the last 10 or so that they've been free to maneuver anywhere around their environment. In the early days, the machines followed a current in a wire buried in a concrete floor. There have since been a handful of different approaches, but all are variants on that theme. They went from wires in the floor to paint on the floor, to tape on the floor, to magnets in the floor, to reflectors on the walls, to QR codes on the ground, but they were all just different types of landmarks. So, the vehicles were confined to a fixed path — quite predictable, but extremely inflexible.