Rfly: MIT develops drone system to provide more accurate inventory tracking - TomoNews
- 7 years ago
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — Researchers at MIT have developed a new system using small drones and RFID tags to monitor inventory, which could help business to log inventory more efficiently.
"In 2016, the U.S. National Retail Federation reported that shrinkage — loss of items in retail stores — averaged around $45.2 billion annually. By enabling drones to find and localize items and equipment, this research will provide a fundamental technological advancement for solving these problems," Fadel Adib, the Sony Corporation Career Development Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, whose group at the MIT Media Lab developed the new system said in a press release.
The researchers have fitted each drone with a RFID tag. The drone alternates between relaying the reader's signal to a tagged item and its own signal back to the reader, allowing the reader to identify the item's location. It is said to be able to localize the tagged items accurately within 19 cm, while extending the range of the reader tenfold in all directions.
The system is dubbed RFly, which will be presented in a paper at the annual conference of the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Data Communications. It will be put through a second phase of trials with a retailer in Massachusetts.
"In 2016, the U.S. National Retail Federation reported that shrinkage — loss of items in retail stores — averaged around $45.2 billion annually. By enabling drones to find and localize items and equipment, this research will provide a fundamental technological advancement for solving these problems," Fadel Adib, the Sony Corporation Career Development Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, whose group at the MIT Media Lab developed the new system said in a press release.
The researchers have fitted each drone with a RFID tag. The drone alternates between relaying the reader's signal to a tagged item and its own signal back to the reader, allowing the reader to identify the item's location. It is said to be able to localize the tagged items accurately within 19 cm, while extending the range of the reader tenfold in all directions.
The system is dubbed RFly, which will be presented in a paper at the annual conference of the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Data Communications. It will be put through a second phase of trials with a retailer in Massachusetts.