Mobile robot for retail inventory using RFID

Abstract

The use of RFID technology is increasing in retail stores, because it improves the performance of automated checkout, inventory and theft detection systems. In this paper, we present a novel implementation of a mobile robot that can perform retail inventory autonomously. The robot can autonomously generate a path to cover all the merchandise within the boundaries of a given store map, and then it can perform the inventory by following the generated path. Experimental results show that our robot can efficiently perform RFID based inventory on a sales floor with complex layout, and provides inventory accuracy that compares favorably to manual inventory.