 
Transponders placed in the floor allow communication with the on-board reader of the truck.
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Specialists see a great future for Radio Frequency Identification, in short referred to as RFID in the logistics industry. The smart radio labels are seen as an effective means to accelerate the flow of materials in the industry and trade, if they are used together with material handling vehicles fitted with the corresponding requirement. Currently, tracing of materials is characterised by manual input of data by handheld data scanners and a central data processing unit. The various scans of goods between reception and delivery are time consuming and prone to errors. Inter-company systems hardly exist. A survey questioning 150 logistics companies which was conducted by the Still GmbH from Hamburg in the frame of the project IdentProLog shows that there is a great interest in the use of RFID systems to register goods and to trace materials. The project scopes the flow of information between the transported good and the load carrier on one hand and the materials handling truck on the other hand, with Still being a leading provider for the equipment of warehouse trucks.
The team from Hamburg did have good reasons to accept this task. They have started to develop RFID supported material handling trucks some years ago already and by this they have provided new functionalities to fork lift trucks. In this, RFID technology is to be used far beyond the known radio label. Corresponding solutions are already available and can be realised immediately. The Hamburg based company uses RFID to localise the vehicles and optimise the operational processes.
This way the location of the goods can be calculated logically taking the status of the vehicle such as its position and its lift height. This data then determines the storage position of the goods which is in turn transmitted to the overarching materials handling system by WLAN. A manual entry of the storage position is not needed.
Indirect identification of the stored goods
The trucks equipped with RFID are able to determine their position autonomously and are by this able to provide the driver with helpful information for navigation. Unnecessary travelling is avoided. Also, many safety functions are offered. For example, depending on the current location of the truck, the speed can be reduced, the lift height can be limited or the light can be switched on automatically. Also, a communication of the truck with its environment is possible, for example operating traffic lights and gates or monitoring one-way roads. After the goods are registered at the goods reception station they are unambiguously allocated to the pallets. This way the stored goods are identified indirectly. The pallet is registered for every internal movement and the system registers every relocation and updates its position in the database. |
