Intelligent Management of Chemical Warehouses with RFID Systems

Abstract

At present, most chemical warehouses rely on human management, which is a time-consuming and laborious process. Therefore, it is very meaningful to use radio frequency identification (RFID) systems for the intelligent management of chemicals. Detecting the remaining amount of chemicals is an important process in the management of a chemical warehouse. It helps managers find the chemicals that are going to run out and replenish them in time. However, in a traditional chemical warehouse, managers usually inspect each chemical on the shelf in turn manually, which is a waste of time and labor. Although some solutions using RFID technology have been proposed, they are expensive and difficult to deploy in a real environment. In order to solve this problem, we propose an intelligent system called the RF-Detector in this paper, which combines robotics and RFID technology. An RFID reader and an antenna are installed on the robot, which achieves automatic scanning of the chemicals. The RF-Detector can achieve two functions: One function is to detect the remaining amount of chemicals using the changes in received signal strength indication (RSSI) and read rate, and the other is to locate chemicals using the phase curve, so that managers can quickly find the chemicals with an insufficient amount remaining. In this paper we implement the RF-Detector and evaluate its performance. The experimental results show that the RF-Detector achieves about 93% detection accuracy and 92% positioning accuracy for chemicals.