Retail Robots with UHF-RFID Moving Antennas enabling 3D Localization

The MONITOR project was born to answer to the increasingly pressing needs for a high-accuracy and reliable inventory in retail. A mobile robot able to autonomously run within the shop can perform a real-time inventory to determine the tagged-item presence and position. The latter represents the added value of the inventory process which allows for enhanced capability of the system in terms of awareness of shop status. Consequently, management operations are simpler and increased attention can be dedicated to the customers. To this aim, commercial Ultra-High-Frequency (UHF) Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) hardware is adopted at the robot side. Enhanced system performance is obtained thanks to the adoption of rotating antennas to optimize the scanning of the shop area and to improve localization performance via synthetic-aperture-radar (SAR) methods.