| KEYWORD |
RFID Tracking and Locating System for Agrifood Logistics
keywords AGRIFOOD LOGISTICS, RADIO-FREQUENCY IDENTIFICATION (RFID) SYSTEMS, REAL-TIME LOCATING SYSTEM (RTLS), SIGNAL PROCESSING, SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
Reference persons DANILO DEMARCHI, PAOLO MOTTO ROS
Research Groups MiNES (Micro&Nano Electronic Systems)
Thesis type EXPERIMENTAL
Description Key aspect of the European “Farm to fork” strategy is the quality assurance and control of the whole agrifood production, processing, and distribution chains. In this regard, traceability is perhaps the most powerful ability to support a precise understanding of the final product full history, valuing and enabling to optimize the full production/value/supply chains as well. Passive UHF Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) is a standard technology nowadays commonly used by logistics in retail and industrial environments, but not yet fully exploited in agrifood scenarios. Basically, this kind of systems is composed by several, small, passive (i.e., no batteries) wireless devices (tags), deployed on the items to be tracked and located, and one or more wireless base stations (readers) able to both power and communicate with the tags leveraging the same RF link. The goal of this work is exactly to widen the adoption in a real case scenario (local agrifood producer, as a part of a research project) to both track and locate (several) products in real-time, eventually combined in larger packages. Tracking is usually considered a viable goal, but performance may vary depending on specific application constraints (e.g., environmental setup and conditions, reading speed, possible combined packaging). Locating items in real-time, on the other hand, is not a primary purpose of RFID systems; however it is possible (in principle) to correlate the Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI, available in some systems) with the distance between the antennas of the tag and the reader. Starting from the analysis of the requirements and constraints of the specific application scenario, through the investigation of features and performance of currently available RFID systems, the final goal is twofold: first, develop (at the system level, with off-the-shelf components) and validate the identification and tracking system; second, to investigate the locating algorithm (eventually based in Artificial Intelligence, AI, approaches) based on the RSSI, and develop a proof-of-concept software for testing on the field performance, advantages and limitations of the proposed locating method.
Required skills System programming; Software development; Signal processing
Deadline 21/11/2023
PROPONI LA TUA CANDIDATURA