Unfortunately currently passive RFID tags do not have the read only range and have trouble being read thru many materials which are used as support structures for racks and storage or to hold up the building itself. This becomes a significant problem when it is coupled by shipping materials, boxes and pallets which make reading of RFID tags difficult to read thru. Then the stacked products may also have significant density. For these reasons those who attempt to automate warehouses are putting RFID reader repeaters on structural support posts holding the building up. A 100,000 square foot building may call for up to 12 repeaters within the poles or hanging on the posts, sometimes in the walls themselves always careful to use special materials to not effect the range of the radio waves.

I propose tethered mini-blimps within the automated warehouses. RFID Repeaters would be on these mini blimp UAVs inside warehouses to prevent transmission problems, lost data or bad reads. There is no sense having a warehouse that is fully automated if you cannot for the life of you figure out what the inventory in that warehouse actually is.

The tethers will be attached to tracks in the ceilings and these tethers will have motors on them and small winches which will allow the altitude of the mini-blimp to move up and down to make sure there is always a good read. The blimp will download the information to the main IT Network and that data will be updated real-time.

In completely automated warehouses you would have mini-blimps above on tracks and forklift robotics rail based units on the bottom. No people, no lighting and kept very simple. In the event that the warehouse had dry goods, furniture and other such products there would be no need for climate control either. No people, no employee pilferage, no workmen’s compensation costs, no union hassles and as the evolution process continued no mistakes causing loss of goods. Since there is no risk of falling, the rails could be set in levels like automated parking structures and therefore the height of the facility or warehouse is irrelevant, it could be 10 stories by nine football fields thus maximizing space. Our mini-blimp proposal lends itself better to single story warehouses, yet can also be applied to multistory warehouse systems. In the case of a multi-story system; the mini-blimps would float between level and tethered to the underside of the rails which the robotic forklifts would be riding on top of.

Currently the American Auto Industry has the robotic vendor network and know how to make this happen. The Japanese are way ahead of the Germans and the Americans in the efficiencies, which come with robotic automated warehouses. RFID is getting closer to solve their issues with the costs of individual tags decreasing thru economies of scale. By using the entrepreneurial spirit and the cost controls and efficiencies that all businesses seek we can move the modern automated warehouses into the future.

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