Roboshop, an Autonomous Robot that through Radio Frequency Makes Inventories and Locates Objects
| University | Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) |
|---|---|
| Centre/Department/Research group | Department of Information and Communication Technologies (DTIC) |
| Research title | Roboshop, an Autonomous Robot that through Radio Frequency Makes Inventories and Locates Objects |
| Scientific area | Industry 4.0, robotics, FRDI |
| Sustainable Development Goal (ODS) | SDG 9: Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation |
| Target(s) to which it contributes | 9.4. By 2030, upgrade infrastructure and retrofit industries to make them sustainable, with increased resource-use efficiency and greater adoption of clean and environmentally sound technologies and industrial processes, with all countries taking action in accordance with their respective capabilities |
RoboShop is a project whose main objective is to design, in the next three years, a “scanner robot” that identifies and locates all objects to maximize the reliability of the inventory and to optimize the accuracy with which the position of each object is calculated.
Inventories are currently performed manually using a bar code, which encodes the reference, but does not differentiate between different objects with the same reference. The bar code obliges to make the inventory manually, with a very high cost and a high level of errors. For a medium store, a team of 5 to 10 people is usually required during a weekend. Because of the manual process, there is only a 95% reliability and the inventory does not include location information beyond the store section.
In order to solve this situation many of the chains of commerce have already adopted RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology, but still with manual readers. RFID technology is a wireless technology that allows the identification of certain objects. It consists of a reader, one or more electronic tags and a system of information of final return. However, the level of reliability of the inventory depends a lot on the experience and motivation of the operator. The item information is captured (each object has a different code), but not its location beyond the store section.
A first use of this device is to make an inventory of the store for operational purposes, as a replacement for manual inventories. The second use is to capture the location information of all store objects as the basis for developing interaction applications based on the paradigm of the Internet of Things, such as interactive mirrors or mirrors.
