Mobile Robot System Design for RFID-based Inventory Checking

Abstract

In many industries, the accurate and quick checking of goods in storage is of great importance. Most today's inventory checking is based on bar code scanning, but the relative position between a bar code and an optical scanner should be maintained in close distance and proper angle for the successful scanning. This requirement makes it difficult to fully automate the inventory information/control systems. The use of RFID technology can be a solution for overcoming this problem. The mobile robot presented in this paper is equipped with an RFID tag scanning system, that automates the otherwise manual or semi-automatic inventory checking process. We designed the robot system in a quite practical approach, and the developed system is close to the commercialization stage. In our experiments, the robot could collect information of goods stacked on shelves autonomously without any failure and maintain corresponding database while it navigated predefined paths between the shelves using vision.