A Real-time Location System Based on RFID and UWB for Digital Manufacturing Workshop

The development of Internet of Things (IoT) has made a profound impact on establishing digital manufacturing workshop. In particular, to satisfy the needs of positioning, tracking and monitoring of manufacturing resources, the Real-Time Location System (RTLS) is developed on the basis of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and Ultra Wide Band (UWB). Firstly, the Holographic Workshop Map (HWM) is defined and designed to construct the framework of the proposed RTLS. Then, the real-time location platform, which is composed of RFID-based regional positioning and UWB-based precise positioning methods, is built to get the real-time location information of all kinds of manufacturing factors in the large discrete manufacturing workshop. Finally, a simulative 8-workstations workshop is constructed and a prototype system is developed to verify the proposed method. The experimental results show that the proposed RTLS is feasible in real-time locating and monitoring.