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Testing of RFID systems and environments

Motivation

RFID systems do not necessarily work as well as advertised. This can be due to interference in the environment, unforseen reflections, or simply an installation which does not account for the peculiarities of the technology. We are conducting research to better understand how RFID performs outside the lab in actual commercial installations, particularly in noisy industrial settings. This work will provide an important component of our other research in RFID-enabled processes as it seeks to find both reliability statistics for RFID equipment and techniques to improve existing RFID installations.

Previous work

Previously work has been conducted here to evaluate the performance of HF RFID readers. These readers see extensive use in our Intelligent Manufacturing lab. The investigation of HF tags produced plots of the area around each reader in which tags could be read, and at what rate. The rate of reads can be taken as an indicator of the strength of the reader field and plays a large part in the reliability which can be expected from a tag. The furthest reach of the read field is shown in this diagram (the upper half is cut away to reveal the dead zone in the middle).

Current Research

Currently we are investigating the performance of UHF readers and tags in various environments. This work is proceeding in parallel with an investigation of product tagging: investigating methods to assess the impact of products on the RFID tag they have attached to them. The lab’s work focuses on a method-based approach, which yields a product-tag model built on extensive empirical testing as well as theoretical extrapolations. We’re currently developing software and hardware to automate the testing process and developing methodologies to categorize tag testing problems.

Learn more..

For further details about this project, please write to Hugo Mallinson at hfm21[at]symbolcam.ac.uk