ANSI/ITSDF B56.5-2024 AGV Safety Standard Is in Effect

WASHINGTON — A driverless tugger does not get a new safety standard because the wheel is new. The Industrial Truck Standards Development Foundation lists ANSI/ITSDF B56.5-2024, Safety Standard for Driverless, Automatic Guided Industrial Vehicles and Automated Functions of Manned Industrial Vehicles, as effective Dec. 16, 2025. The same public page still lists the 2019 edition, effective Aug. 12, 2020. The vehicle in the aisle may have been documented to either date. The dock plate does not care which edition is on the purchase order.

Drive wheels CasterHQ manufactures for that work: keyed drive wheels — custom keyed and keyway wheels, in polyurethane on steel and rubber on steel.

This is an announcement of the effective date on ITSDF’s standards list. It does not quote the standard’s requirements. Copies are available free on request from ITSDF after registration. CasterHQ does not sell automatic guided vehicles. It manufactures and sells custom keyed drive wheels — some buyers call them keyway wheels — made for AGV manufacturers and as replacement wheels on AGVs already in service. Nothing here says a wheel, vehicle, or installation meets B56.5.

Driverless tugger vehicles on a plant floor (Egemin Automation / AGVExpertJS, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons). Not an ITSDF test photo.

What the public list says the standard covers

ITSDF’s announcements page describes B56.5-2024 as defining safety requirements for the design, operation, and maintenance of powered, not mechanically restrained, unmanned automatic guided industrial vehicles and the system those vehicles are part of. The same public summary says it also applies to vehicles originally designed to operate only with an operator that are later modified to run unmanned, automatically, or in a semiautomatic, manual, or maintenance mode.

That last sentence is the one a plant should not skip. A manned truck that was later given an automatic mode can fall inside the same standard as a purpose-built AGV. The numbered clauses stay in the document. Do not treat this article as a substitute for it, and do not treat a vendor brochure as proof of conformance.

What this standard is not

B56.5 is an industrial-truck safety standard for driverless and automatic guided vehicles, and for automated functions added to manned industrial vehicles. It is not a wheel specification. On the same ITSDF list, ANSI/ITSDF B56.11.1-2018, Double Race or Bi-Level Swivel and Rigid Industrial Casters, is marked withdrawn as of Oct. 10, 2023. Do not read the AGV standard as a caster specification, and do not treat a drive-wheel order as proof a vehicle meets B56.5.

A related date on the same page

The same list shows ANSI/ITSDF B56.10-2025, Manually Propelled High Lift Industrial Trucks, as effective Dec. 17, 2026. That is a separate standard for operator-controlled, manually propelled high-lift trucks. A walk-behind high-lift still used on a mezzanine is not settled by the AGV date. This article does not summarize B56.10.

The wheel still has to cross the dock

If a site is specifying, modifying, or running driverless industrial vehicles, the practical step is documentary: ask the vehicle or integrator supplier which edition of B56.5 the equipment was designed and documented against, and whether a manned truck was later modified into an automatic mode. An effective date on a standards list does not, by itself, change a purchase order or prove a vehicle already in the aisle was built to the 2024 edition.

The wheel question sits beside that paper, not inside it. CasterHQ manufactures custom keyed and keyway drive wheels for AGV manufacturers and as replacements on AGVs in service, in two tread builds. Polyurethane on steel is used more on warehouse AGVs, where the floor is relatively even and the loop is long. Rubber on steel is used more often on AGVs that load and unload trucks, where the softer tread has to cross dock gaps, plates, and uneven ground. A hard tread that works in the racking aisle can start to chatter, or climb, the first time it hits a trailer threshold. A replacement wheel does not certify the vehicle to B56.5. For how a keyed wheel differs from a bored wheel, see Keyed vs. bored wheels.

Jordan Wilson, who owns CasterHQ, said many large manufacturers have asked the company to use its repair, maintenance, and service work to replace and install their AGV drive wheels, and that CasterHQ is in talks with some of the largest companies in the United States about that work. Those are conversations, not announced contracts. No company is named. None of them reviewed this article.

The house that builds the wheel

CasterHQ is a Mansfield, Texas caster house. It manufactures the custom keyed drive wheels at keyed drive wheels, and it runs a stocking warehouse built for the service call that follows a failed drive wheel. Repair and install talks described above are CasterHQ’s own account, not signed work. This article reports a safety-standard effective date. It does not claim any CasterHQ wheel or service meets B56.5, and it does not sell the vehicle.