8
Synchronization
8021386/12G4 /2019-04-24 | SICK
OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS | NAV-LOC
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Subject to change without notice
8
Synchronization
A very important aspect in the vehicle control is the time synchronization between the AGV vehicle
controller and the internal time stamp of the NAV-LOCs controller called SIM.
The clock of the AGV vehicle controller and the clock of the SIM must be synchronized periodically. For
motion control, it is necessary that the AGV controller can assign its own time stamp to each position
produced by NAV-LOC.
The system latencies without this synchronization is described in chapter 12.2.
The internal time stamp of the embedded application increases in increments of 1 every 1 ms.
Additionally, the time stamp of the embedded application is synchronized internally by the SIM with the
time stamp of the connected 2D LiDAR sensor. Each result (measurement data and localization result)
from NAV-LOC is then provided with the internal time stamp of the embedded application.
NOTE
For synchronization, CoLa A commands are used for communication between the SIM module and the
vehicle controller or your service computer, which is described in the separate document “Telegram
Listing”
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.
NOTE
This chapter elaborates about the synchronization of NAV-LOC and between the AGV vehicle controller.
The synchronization between the connected 2D LiDAR sensor and the NAV-LOC controller (SIM) is done
internally by the embedded application of and is described in chapter 2.5 of each of the device-specific
documents:
SIM2000, NAV310 operating instructions (German
SIM2000, NAV245 operating instructions (German
8.1
Synchronization options
NAV-LOC has three options available for synchronizing the internal time of embedded application with
the system time of the vehicle computer.
8.1.1
Synchronization via telegram request (polling)
The vehicle computer retrieves the internal time of the embedded application using the
NAVGet-
Timestamp
telegram.
The embedded application writes its internal time into a telegram and sends this to the vehicle com-
puter.
Sending may happen with a delay time of up to a few milliseconds, which results in some uncertainty.
This can be overcome with the 2nd synchronization method.
An example could be to request the time stamp from NAV-LOC every 10 seconds.
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Open the page
and enter the part number of the NAV-LOC telegram listing
(English) into the search field.