Navigation of line following mobile robot aided by RFID technology for indoor warehouse inventory counting systems

In businesses that engage in mass product distribution, warehousing plays an integral part of a product lifecycle. The difficulty with warehousing is the management of inventories and making sure that the counts of inventories always stay true to the system record. In the Philippines, it can be observed that numerous companies still utilize manual counting process, which is unreliable and slow. This program aims to create an automated counting system for inventories in a warehouse setup. The study was conducted in a local electronics distribution warehouse. The goal is to be able to create an easy to deploy process that can replace the manual counting process that takes up an estimate of 8 hours to finish. The system is composed of the robot navigation and RFID reading. The hardware for navigation utilizes a PIC16f77a microcontroller, infrared line sensors and proximity sensors. The RFID reading involves utilization of UHF RFID reader and passive RFID tags placed in the warehouse inventories for product reading. To execute count, the robot must simply be placed in the lines at the aisles with its antennas pointing to its left and right, it will simultaneously read the tags it passes through with the capability of reading inventories up to 3 meters high. The read data is wirelessly transmitted to the server which automatically updates the user website