Drone-mounted RFID-based rack localization for assets in warehouses using deep learning

With the ongoing push towards an automated Industry 4.0, data-driven intelligent algorithms are getting more attention. Warehouse operators have traditionally required human labor to identify and register their assets. Autonomous flying drones will help alleviate this task by flying through the warehouse and detecting assets. This can be done based on vision, requiring expensive and energy consuming hardware, limiting drone flight time. In contrast, we propose a solution using radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags and machine learned algorithms to localize assets, which does not require a well-lit environment and can be processed in an energy efficient way. Our machine learning model achieves a 92–93 % accuracy, even when the drone is flying at different heights than the assets. Additionally, the model is easily implementable on off-the-shelf and low-energy consuming embedded hardware. This data-driven solution can easily be retrained for different environments and allows cheap RFID-based horizontal localization of assets in warehouses of the future.