doi:10.3850/978-981-08-7723-1_P254

ABSTRACT

Inventory control is a key issue for efficient warehouse management systems (WMS), and maintaining the accurate inventory database (DB) is an important prerequisite. This paper describes a mobile radio frequency identification (RFID) tag scanning system developed for the automated data collection of warehouse inventory. The system consists largely of a mobile robot, a scanner for RFID tags, and an inventory DB. The RFID tag scanner is mounted on the wheeled mobile robot, and the robot collects the tag data of stocks by navigating through the aisles between rows of shelves at a warehouse. One of two vision techniques, optical flow and line following, can be used for the navigation of the robot. The scanned tag data are transmitted via wireless internet to a remote computer to update the inventory DB in real time. In experiments, the system collected all tag data successfully.

Keywords: Mobile robot, RFID, Optical flow, Line-following, Warehouse, Inventory management.

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