Lightweight RFID Reader for Drones

This project began with Indro Robotics, a R&D company who specializes in the development of unmanned vehicles. They reached out to us to come up with a proof of concept of a lightweight RFID reader for drones. This would be used to augment the performance of their existing camera-based inventory management system. Problems such as improper lighting and damaged labels causes the vision-based system to generate inaccurate readings. New technology such as RFID does not rely on line-of-sight, but instead uses radio waves to identify objects.

We were challenged to design and build a lightweight RFID scanner that would meet the following criteria:

– Have a read range over 0.7 m.

– Have a maximum dimension of 20x20x20 cm with payload.

– Weigh no more than 1kg.

– Be built within a budget of $1000.00.

– Store data in the Jetson Nano.

– Reads tags in all orientations.

The solution consisted of designing and building a lightweight RFID scanner for drones that would be able to scan multiple tags and store its data on the onboard Jetson Nano. This was accomplished with the Spark Fun Simultaneous RFID Scanner and supporting hardware. This development board is designed to work with an Arduino, but with extensive firmware development the reader was able to transmit, receive and decode radio waves sent from the RFID tags. Then sends the data directly to the Jetson Nano via serial communication.

This project was a valuable learning opportunity to gain skills we never had. The project involved 3D modeling, 3D printing, custom circuit schematics, bill of materials, C-programming, microcontroller interfacing. Fortunately, we accomplished all our project criteria, and it was returned to our client where they will develop the idea further.