Inventory Robots: Performance Evaluation of an RFID-Based Navigation Strategy

Inventory robots produce accurate results while reducing costs. Such robots are specialized in navigating around store/warehouse facilities while reading radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. However, commercial stores pose a serious challenge to navigation capabilities since these scenarios are likely to be modified relatively frequently. Current solutions involve having to remap the modified layout and redesign the robots’ routes. This means that a human operator must direct the robot through the target area, reducing the autonomy and scalability of these solutions. The main goals of this article are: first, assessing the feasibility of RFID-based exploration to enable autonomous mapping of inventory environments, and second, comparing the classical robotic navigation based on waypoints to the RFID-based navigation strategy. It will be shown that RFID-based strategies can be used to successfully build maps autonomously and obtain similar inventory accuracies when compared to the current nonautonomous strategies.