RFID – facts and myths
RFID technology continues to develop very rapidly. Mandates from retail chain organizations like Wal-Mart (“the American Tesco”) and the US Department of Defense, requiring manufacturers to standardize, have led to the emergence of a new market for RFID integrators, which stimulates the development of this technique and its widespread acceptance. With the development of technology and decreasing costs of implementing RFID, the range of possibilities for using this identification method is expanding.
Information about new technical solutions can sometimes be compared to so-called “urban legends,” which contain many highly exaggerated stories and little truth. RFID is often talked about as a device that can track the path of a product, starting from the production process to distribution – giving the ability to identify the product, determine its origin and delivery destination, as well as encode many different pieces of information about product features. For now, this is not the case.
In reality, RFID tags for most products – in accordance with the standardization supported by Wal-Mart – would contain a 96-bit electronic product code, which is essentially a unique digital code identifying only a given product, its manufacturer, product class, and its serial number. However, RFID has the potential to become more than just an electronic identification system for products moving through the supply chain – this is especially true for its use in a manufacturing plant or warehouse.
Differences in the application of RFID and barcodes
One of the key advantages of RFID technology is the variety of tags and radio frequencies used for communication, which offers the possibility of choosing the type of tag for a specific application. An additional advantage of RFID is that other automatic identification techniques, such as barcodes, do not have the ability to read an identification label if it is not directly in the line of sight (which, in the case of RFID, depends on the frequency range). This feature is particularly useful in warehouse and industrial environments where dust or other difficult conditions would make it impossible to read barcodes.
RFID identification technology does not necessarily have to replace barcodes, but will most likely be used in parallel with them, depending on the conditions of a given environment. RFID tags can be protected against various factors, for example by placing them in plastic covers that do not interfere with the transmission of radio signals. RFID tags can be welded or otherwise attached (hung) to an object, often even quite high up. Furthermore, combining RFID tags with measuring sensors introduces the possibility of capturing and transmitting parameters such as temperature, vibration, or other values relevant to a given device. Such a combination is the beginning of a new practical application that will incredibly facilitate data collection in the manufacturing plant in the future.