What Are Smart Shelves?

Intelligent shelves are the basis of intelligent warehouse management. The field microcontrollers in the intelligent warehouse are all installed on the intelligent shelf.

Smart Shelves

Intelligent shelves are the basis of intelligent warehouse management. The field microcontrollers in the intelligent warehouse are all installed on the intelligent shelf.

Chinese name

Smart Shelves

Location

The foundation of intelligent warehouse management

Make up

Tag, Reader

market expectation

Wide range of applications

(1) The management host can simply and intuitively enter the items stored on the shelf through the on-site machine (Single Chip Microcomputer), convenient and quick query, and flexible classification statistics. ^[1]

Smart shelves are a new technology in development, and there is currently no finalized product. In terms of structure, various manufacturers are exploring and developing. As far as the current finished product, its structure has the following characteristics: ^[1]

The software of the intelligent shelf is controlled by the management host, but when the distributed system is adopted, the intelligent shelf can also run independently. ^[1]

A basic RFID system consists of three parts: a tag and a reader. ^[2]

After the tag enters the magnetic field, it receives the radio frequency signal from the reader, and uses the energy obtained by the induced current to send out the product information stored in the chip, or actively sends a signal of a certain frequency; after the reader reads the information and decodes it, it sends it to The central information system processes the relevant data. All RFID systems are derived from this classic triangular structure. Among the retail enterprises, the closest to the actual business of the enterprise and the most widely accepted by the enterprise is the RFID deployment solution based on smart shelves.

In the intelligent shelf system, users use RFID readers installed on specially designed shelves to obtain information about the goods placed on the shelves, and perform application-level work such as logistics tracking and passenger flow analysis on the basis of this. Not only that, compared to traditional non-electronic tags that use EAN / UCC coding rules, RFID tags can convey rich information through the tag itself, including the manufacturer of the product, shelf life and various custom-made attributes can be directly read. No need to manage complex data in business systems. This deployment scheme is also close to the traditional store layout in form, and can be transformed from current facilities on a certain basis, thus becoming the most widely used option in the early stages of RFID application. Many large retail companies, including Metro, have used their various derivative solutions for store management. However, we must also see the limitations of this scheme: First, it is an expensive investment plan. Large-scale deployment of RFID readers is bound to bring a lot of pressure on hardware costs. Secondly, because this solution mostly uses passive RFID tags with a small reading distance, in some cases it is necessary to use multiple readers to cover the same shelf to ensure the accuracy of data collection, which will inevitably lead to a certain degree of waste of resources.

In order to overcome the shortcomings of early smart shelves, RFID vendors tried to provide advanced solutions in various parts of the RFID system. One idea is to use active RFID tags. The main difference between an active tag and a passive tag is that it uses a built-in battery as an energy source and actively transmits radio frequency signals, so that it can be read by readers with low density and low sensitivity. At the same time, active tags are more reliable than passive tags. It is just because the active tag itself has a high cost, its life is affected by the battery, and its reader is also expensive, and currently cannot be widely used in sales stores. However, with the cost reduction brought by mass production and its inherent advantages of supporting the 802.11 standard, active tags will occupy a place in the retail industry. According to the latest data, users and suppliers of active RFID tags have doubled in the past year, and according to industry forecasts, this speed will accelerate in the next few years.

Another idea to solve the problem is to replace the fixed reader with a long-range reader equipped with a directional antenna. The high-power directional reader can complete the identification by "sweeping" the shelf, and can process a large amount of tag information at one time, which greatly improves the collection efficiency. However, it is precisely because of this characteristic that it also brings certain uncontrollability to its application. In a series of experiments and applications conducted by the U.S. military, it was found that in some cases, this type of equipment requires additional work to identify previously read tag information to prevent repeated identification of the tag; at the same time, because The sensitivity of the identifier is high, and it is also a problem that must be considered to distinguish the tag signal and the electronic background noise. Recently, directional antennas have been successfully applied to electronic tags themselves. Finnish company Wisteq has started selling such products at low cost. Their products can work satisfactorily even in metals and liquids.

It's also a good idea to let fixed readers start to "move". In many cases, we don't need continuous RFID information, just need to be identified regularly or when needed. In this case, it is entirely possible to use a manually held portable reader to complete the acquisition. At the same time, portable electronic devices based on intelligent operating systems such as Windows CE will bring extremely rich expansion possibilities to this solution. Some people even pointed out that according to the data obtained from the analysis, deploying an appropriate reader on a smart shopping cart can not only identify the goods placed in it in real time, thereby supporting self-service cashier services, but also can This kind of tag information is collected, and the customer's movement is skillfully used to complete the problem that originally required a complex reader deployment solution to solve.

The antenna module, which is the link between the tag and the reader, is also being continuously improved. The smart antenna technology that is already in use is one of them. This technology uses a side-by-side adaptive antenna group that works under the control of a specially designed processor. By analyzing the signals received by different antennas, the system can accurately locate the direction and distance of the tag, and provide multi-dimensional identification information. This type of equipment can be widely used in location-related fields such as warehouse management. In addition, the technology of using conductive ink to print RFID circuits and antennas has also gradually been applied. Not long ago, ABC Nanotech in Daejeon, South Korea, announced that it has successfully researched a new type of conductive ink. This nano-scale material will not only be used for printed circuit boards, but also RFID antennas printed with it. Has the same performance as traditional copper coils. The popularity of this achievement will greatly reduce the cost of RFID and bring a wider application prospect.

The revolution that RFID technology will bring to the retail industry is unprecedented. The "future store" model that widely uses RFID-related technologies will undoubtedly paint a bright future for the retail industry. At the same time, more new questions have been raised for software and hardware vendors. The cost of RFID tags and readers is not yet acceptable to most retailers. Optimistic forecasts point out that when the demand for tags reaches at least one million orders of magnitude, the cost will fall to an acceptable 3 to 5 cents per sheet. Level. And the accuracy of RFID reading needs to be further improved. Even in the application of the US military, it can only reach 99% accuracy. The remaining 1% omissions or errors still need special treatment by other systems.

Even so, with the continuous development of RFID technology, these difficulties will eventually be overcome. It is believed that more application models will stand out and serve the retail industry practitioners who always follow the trend.