Robotics & Automation

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'RFly' Drones Find Missing Objects with Battery-Free RFIDs

Large warehouses across the country lose billions of dollars every year from lost inventory. To enable more efficient inventory control, companies have looked into using cheap, battery-free RFID tags attached to objects similar to barcodes and which can be read and identified from a distance. However, today's solutions for scanning RFIDs can only work at fairly short distances. 'RFly' is a new drone-based wireless technology from MIT that overcomes this range limitation and extends the coverage for RFID location. Its key innovation is a new relay technology that can integrate with a deployed RFID infrastructure and at the same time identify the location of every item to within less than a foot.