Abbie Hill with Dr. Alfonso Gutierrez, Lindsay Angell, and Anthony Surya

UW-Madison Department of Industrial Engineering

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is an automatic identification technology.  RFID tags contain microchips that communicate with readers using radio waves and store information about a product.  Traditionally, barcodes have been used to store this type of information, but RFID tags can store much more data than barcodes and do not require line-of-sight processing.  Because of these advantages, RFID technology has attracted attention in manufacturing and supply chain management as a way to track and trace inventory.  In these fields, products are frequently transported by conveyors.  In order to design the most effective RFID systems, it is important to understand how RFID components function in different settings used in the real world, such as conveyors.

This experiment tested the effects of conveyor speed on the read rate—or number of reads per second—of RFID tags.  We attached a passive RFID tag to a box on a conveyor loop and collected read rate data for four different tag placements.  The results showed a general trend of read rates decreasing as conveyor speed increased and that tags placed on top of the box had higher read rates on average.