Localization for industrial warehouse storage rack using passive UHF RFID system

Tracking the location of items on the warehouse storage rack automatically is required by manufacturing companies to improve operational efficiency, productivity, and resource utilization. Due to the long reading range and faster data transfer rate, passive ultra-high frequency (UHF) RFID system is explored to localize the items on the rack in this study. A tag is incorporated into an item on the rack for localization using radio signals. The received signal strength indication (RSSI) and radio frequency (RF) phase are utilized for localization. A supervised clustering approach is developed based on the measurements of location tag at the different zone of the rack. The localization accuracy is improved by using the kernel as a similarity measure. If the desired granularity of item location is not small, the lower price point per tag makes passive RFID systems more economical than active RFID systems.