chrispeng [ad_1]
Every year, about 10,000 vehicles are shipped to Barodge AutoPool, an abandoned car park near Fort Wayne, Indiana. This auto insurance company mainly accepts abandoned vehicles and then sells them to the public or auctions them on the Internet. Since this 25-acre parking lot usually parks about 3,000 to 4,000 cars, it takes time to bring these cars to the auction site when these vehicles are needed. And it often happens that a particular vehicle cannot be found or the wrong vehicle is sent to the auction house.
In order to solve these problems, Barodge chief Barry Howard used his engineering background to develop an RFID system to reduce the working time of employees. This DogBoneRFID tracking system has been successfully applied in the parking lot. Barry Howard established another company, Alli-Solutions, and Committed to promoting this system in the automotive industry. According to Howard, a 40-acre parking lot has been testing the system for the past six months.
Before the DogBone system was installed, when an abandoned car was transported back to the parking space of the parking lot, the detailed information of the car, including the VIN code and description, and the ID code of the parking space, was manually recorded on a piece of paper. After receiving this document, Barodge office staff gave a corresponding inventory number (the number assigned to the car by the inventory system) and entered it into the company’s existing inventory management system software. When the car is to be auctioned, the loading driver will receive a list with the car’s information and parking space number. Sometimes the driver enters the wrong parking space number, or the vehicle is moved to a different location, etc., so that the vehicle is not at its expected location.
Alli-Solutions business development manager Angus McNeel explained that the DogBone solution (completely composed of existing hardware products on the market) solves this problem. When the vehicle was sent to the parking lot, a UHFEPCGen2 label was affixed to the windshield of the vehicle. Employees use a Motorola handheld Wi-Fi device equipped with a barcode scanner GPS receiver and a camera to scan barcodes.
Then the machine displays the car inventory number (McNeely said that in the future, Alli-Solutions plans to use a handheld machine with an embedded RFID reader to read the tag on the windshield), and then use the handheld machine’s built-in camera to take pictures of the car. The photo and tag number are sent to the company via Wi-Fi connection. The information received by DogBone software, including GPS location, parking space number, corresponds to the inventory number, and forwards the data to the existing inventory management system.
Each truck loaded by the company is equipped with a Wi-Fi computer, a GPS kit and an Intermec RFID reader with four antennas. When the loading vehicle receives the task, the screen will display the photo, description, parking space number, and parking lot map of the picked-up vehicle, and mark the exact location of the vehicle. When picking up the car, the driver can compare photos of the actual vehicle. At the same time, the reader also reads the RFID tag of the vehicle, and the software determines whether the vehicle has been taken away based on the frequency of the signal received by the antenna. The DogBone software will compare the actual vehicle RFID number with the RFID number of the picked-up vehicle. If the message does not match, the system will send an alert. If the information matches, the driver will send the vehicle to the auction site.
After completing the mission, the screen will display the next vehicle to be picked up. This saves a lot of time for drivers to go to the office for confirmation, improves efficiency and saves some costs.
In addition, when the driver picks up the vehicle through the parking lot, the reader on the truck is used to sense the location of the picked up vehicle. The GPS judges the location of the loaded truck, and the PC sends this information to the back-end system through the Wi-Fi 802.11 connection.
The DogBone software will confirm the location of each labeled vehicle. If a vehicle is not in the original parking space, it will also be detected to ensure that vehicles that have not been auctioned are not removed from the garage.
In the Barodge office, the screen displays maps of different areas in the parking lot, including vehicle parking areas, waiting areas, and auction sales areas. The system automatically converts the state of the vehicle according to the area where the vehicle is located. For example, if the vehicle is placed in the sales area, the system knows that the vehicle is ready for sale.
Alli-Solutions hopes that this technology can be applied in industries other than auto auction houses. Since the handheld device is equipped with a camera, the user can record the damage to the vehicle or object.
The cost of this system depends on the number of vehicles, the amount of tags, readers and related hardware. Since installing the system, Barodge said the company’s number of loading machines has been reduced from three to two. McNeely also said that Barodge’s operational efficiency has increased by 50%.
[ad_2]
