Joint RFID and UWB Technologies in Intelligent Warehousing Management System

Joint application of radio-frequency identification (RFID) and ultrawideband (UWB) technologies in the intelligent warehousing management system is proposed. In this system, we regard forklift as infrastructure, and both the UWB mobile terminal (MT) and the RFID reader are mounted on the forklift. The RFID reader is used not only to read the information of goods but also to determine the goods' status of loading and unloading. The UWB MT is used to locate the forklift. The goods or pallets are labeled with RFID tags. Utilizing the integration of these two technologies, the dual goals of goods information and goods location perception are achieved. An M/N-K sliding window method is proposed to determine the loading and unloading of goods in this article. Our experiments reveal that this novel method can quickly, accurately, and efficiently determine the states of the goods on the forklift. For the indoor localization, an algorithm is proposed based on RSS residual weighting (RRW). Experiments show that RRW can mitigate the nonline-of-sight error substantially compared with the conventional Taylor algorithm and recent Convex approximation algorithm. Finally, a real working practice in a warehouse of a company is introduced, and it illustrates the feasibility of the system.