Insight · 2026-10-30
The difference is usually described as fixed path versus free navigation. In practice the decision turns on three things: how often your layout changes, what your floor is like, and who maintains the map.
Both AGV and AMR move material without a driver. The difference that matters commercially is where the intelligence sits. An AGV follows infrastructure — magnetic tape, QR markers, rails. An AMR builds a map and navigates it, using lidar and cameras to route around what it finds.
If material moves between the same two points, in the same sequence, for years, fixed-path infrastructure is cheap, predictable and easy to explain to a shift supervisor. Tape does not need a licence, does not get confused by a pallet left in an aisle, and any technician can repair it.
Warehouses reorganise. Production lines get rebalanced. If you expect to move a racking block twice a year, tape becomes a recurring cost and a recurring shutdown. An AMR lets you redraw the route on a screen instead of cutting the floor.
Who maintains the map? An AMR needs someone on your side who can re-map a zone after a layout change, and knows what to do when localisation drifts. If nobody owns that, an AMR becomes a support ticket generator.
What does the floor look like? Expansion joints, ramps, damaged epoxy, reflective surfaces and mezzanine edges all stress navigation. Have the floor measured, not estimated.
How mixed is the traffic? Forklifts, pedestrians and pallet trucks behave unpredictably. AMRs handle this better than AGVs — but only if safety zones were designed for your actual traffic density, not the demo hall.
Neither technology removes the need to think about the docking point, the charger location, or what the robot does when the warehouse management system is offline. Those decisions sit above the AGV-versus-AMR question, and they decide whether the project succeeds.
Tell us about your site — we will tell you honestly whether this is a robot project.