Performance Assessment of a UHF-RFID Robotic Inventory System for Industry 4.0

Abstract

In recent years, automatic RFID inventory systems at the UHF band are becoming largely diffused. Therefore, the need to study their effectiveness in terms of inventory accuracy is raising. In this paper, we present a performance assessment analysis of a UHF-RFID robotic inventory system in a real indoor industrial environment. The experimental analysis is conducted at the facilities of Aircraft Cabin Modification - ACM Aerospace GmbH, Memmingen, Germany. In particular, the choice of antenna radiation pattern, distance from the metallic shelving, robot speed, and RFID reader inventory configuration had turned out to be relevant in order to maximize the inventory accuracy. With a proper parameter configuration, a 100% inventory accuracy can be achieved in the company warehouse with high-density tag deployment, by highlighting the robustness of the proposed robot-based RFID inventory system to multipath effect and electromagnetic coupling among tags.