Unmanned Vehicle Using Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) in Instant Beverage Industry

Unmanned Vehicle like Forklift in the warehouse of Instant Beverage Industry is not permanent and may change anytime depending on piles of pallets. The alert for moving forklift is just the horn, so the operators must be cautious while passing in the aisles. To minimize human error which may cause forklift collision, and to accelerate the picking and delivery activities using the forklifts, an alert system in the form of flexible and accurate traffic LED is really needed. The traffic LEDs of the forklift are designed to be flexible which can move alongwith the forklift. So, the LED can alert forklift operators faster as they work automatically when there are other forklifts passing around. This traffic LEDs utilizes wireless technology in the form of WI-FI signal. Changes in WI-FI signal strength will indicate the presence of a transmitter towards the receiver. Then the signal is changed into the radius of the object. The distance of the forklift approaching at a certain radius will activates the "proceed" LED on one of the forklifts and the "stop" LED at another forklift. Hence, the forklift traffic can run smoothly and safely. The ESP8266 module has a fairly accurate RSSI measurement which has low presentation error, no more than 10%. However, the Wi-Fi network scanning time a little bit longer to make RSSI conversions to the actual distance, so that the action-taking process of the prototype becomes slower. For further research, it is expected that there will be components / tools that can convert RSSI faster so that the development of distance measurement technology using Wi-Fi signals can be improved.