IPICO Inc. and McMaster RFID Applications Laboratory have been awarded a $1.2 million (Canadian dollars) grant to create an RFID system that would capture and analyze data related to traffic use and capacity, without a corresponding increase in investment in road infrastructure. The technology also could be used to help manage traffic, reducing road delays and transit time, and then reduce both emissions and dependency on fossil fuels.
The grant was from the International Science and Technology Partnerships Canada Inc. and the Global Innovation & Technology Alliance. McMaster and IPICO will work with the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and Strategic Consultants, both of New Delhi, India.
The consortium had submitted a proposal to develop and create a platform for a specially designed passive commercial RFID transponder that would be capable of carrying significant, safe, secure and accurate information pertaining to the vehicle itself, including its identity. This information collected would be used to manage transportation flows on highways and roads.
Alanco Technologies has announced that its subsidiary Alanco/TSI Prism, a provider of real-time RFID tracking technologies, has won a $3.3 million contract to create an RFID-based inmate tracking system for the Washington D.C. Department of Corrections.
The Alanco/TSI Prism system, which will combine Alanco’s TSI Prism RFID system with Wi-Fi compatible RTLS technology from AeroScout, will be installed at a Washington DC jail complex housing over 2,000 prisoners and staffed by 450 DOC employees. The system is intended to increase safety and improve inmate accountability.
Hewlett-Packard has introduced a new service which enables clients to track their critical data center assets. The HP Factory Express RFID Service automates and tracks device movement, eliminating the need for employees to manually track inventory.
The HP tagging process scans factory-built HP components such as servers, storage devices and rack enclosures before they are incorporated into a client’s data center, and provides an accurate inventory of the assets throughout their life cycle. The service can provide real-time supply chain visibility, helping to reduce property loss, increase security and improve audit controls.
There are two levels of the service available. The HP RFID Factory Express Standard Service includes standard generation-two RFID tags affixed to specific HP products or packaging with a unique Electronic Product Code assignment and data tracking capabilities. The HP RFID Factory Express Custom Service allows for customized RFID tag placement and additional RFID services from HP that transmit RFID tracking information from the factory to the customer.
The HP Factory Express RFID Service is available directly through HP or its channel partners in the United States and Canada, or as part of HP Factory Express, a broader portfolio of integrated factory solutions and deployment services. HP plans to extend the service to customers worldwide over the next year.
This is actually about a month old, but I discovered it while reading Elektor Magazine. I couldn’t find the link from Elektor, but since its a standard press release, I found another place that had it…
Radiocrafts AS and Paris-based Innovative Technologies successfully implemented a novel ZigBee-based wireless system, designed by Innovative Technologies based on the Radiocrafts RC2300 RF module, targeted at parking lots. Read more on this article.
The Chinese Olympic Committee has offered more details about the RFID-enabled tickets being issued for the Beijing Olympics this summer. All tickets to the opening and closing ceremonies will include RFID tags containing personal information about the ticket holder, including passport information and home and e-mail addresses.
The information is included in an attempt to thwart counterfeiting of the tickets, which have a face value of $720. But the tickets raise concern among security experts, who theorize that an extremely secure RFID system to handle the tickets could cause serious tie-ups at the gates, while a lax security system would make ticket holders’ personal data easy prey to hackers. Officials say the Games’ security team will employ an IT team of at least 4,000 experts with 1,000 servers at their disposal, testing the system for the next two months.
Officials originally planned to embed RFID tags in all 6.8 million tickets issued for Olympics events. These plans apparently went by the wayside, along with a plan to include place a photo of each ticket holder on their ticket. The RFID tags will only be in tickets for the opening and closing events, and photos of the tickets released to the press show no photos on them.
The New Zealand government has pledged $23.3 million (New Zealand dollars) to create a system of mandatory RFID-tagging for all of the country’s farm-raised cattle and deer by 2011. The funding for the biosecurity project will cover its set-up costs, with a new tax likely to be levied to support operational costs.
Under the proposed National Animal Identification and Tracing project, each farm animal will be assigned a unique code that will be stored in a database alongside details such as the age, sex and breed of the animal, its owner, its herd of origin and the identification number of the property on which it is located. The project would also create FarmsOnLine, an online database that will store up-to-date electronic maps of farms along with their contact and stock details.
The system will assist in tracking animals in the event of disease outbreak, but could also be used by farmers to improve farm management, and by retailers to provide consumers with more information about meat’s origin.
The mandatory nature of the system will require new legislation to put it into permanent effect, but officials believe they can get the system up and running before such legislation is passed. Trials of RFID tags are under way at a dozen farms in New Zealand.
Here’s a post from the Cisco blog on how IT is affecting Machine-to-Machine communications…
I’ve been thinking about how machine-to-machine (M2M) communications will evolve, and what it will mean for the network. We seven billion humans think we’re the majority, with about one billion of us connected to the Internet and more than three billion chatting on cell phones. But there’s another population that overshadows us: Machines. By some counts, there are 10 times as many of them as of us – over 70 billion. Most of them are not yet connected, but this will change.
Cars, irrigation systems, and weather sensors are just the beginning. Proprietary, legacy systems are converging on IP due to cost efficiencies and benefits of standardization. New technologies such as Zigbee promise to tie together disparate devices in a cost-effective mesh. Read more on this article at Cisco Blog
Gizmo is a remote-controlled toy monster truck which has been tricked out by Calit2 UCSD researchers. At just 20″x14″x11″ in size, it is tiny when compared to regular trucks, but it can deliver something that they cannot: an adaptable and reliable research platform which is reconfigurable for the task at hand.
Gizmo’s “tricks” are treats for researchers. Each truck has a Calit2 CalMesh ad-hoc network board which is equipped with both wireless local area network (WLAN) and global positioning system (GPS) cards. Basic features currently include full motor capabilities (forward, reverse, braking), an override circuit for manual remote control and a web-enabled camera.
The underlying motivation of the Gizmo project is to create an autonomous multi-radio platform that can be controlled by many kinds of interfaces and can be used for a wide variety of applications, such as, disaster response environments, radio frequency (RF) mapping, data gathering and educational purposes, as well as others.
The idea of this technology is to develop collision free traffic in the future where cars are control by centralized traffic controller, following the successful of fly-by-wire technology that have been applied in aviation field for years. In the future where most areas are covered by WLAN or WIMAX wireless signals, all vehicles are controlled by central traffic controller where passengers only need to key in their destinations into the cockpit control panel.
To build the most robust and secure wireless devices, suppliers build according to an approved standard. Wireless Internet communications, for example, all comply to the familiar IEEE 802.11 (b, g, and n) standards. Currently, both the HART Communication Foundation (HCF, Austin, TX) and ISA (Research Triangle Park, NC) are involved in putting forth an industrial wireless standard at the basic “bits and bytes” level (i.e., sensors) (see sidebar, “Which wireless?”). HCF released its standard, WirelessHART (HART generation 7), in September 2007. To date, ISA is continuing to develop a draft of its standard, officially noted as ISA 100.11a (often referred to as SP 100).
Both organizations aim for global acceptance, including by the pharmaceutical industry, which thanks to the move toward quality by design, is preparing for increased in-process monitoring. Both HCF and ISA agree that a wireless standard is the right step to advance process automation and communication. Both are aware they are competing to achieve the same objective. And of course both would argue that their standard is the most beneficial, robust, and secure. Read more on this article.
Cephalon Inc. has selected OAT’s RFID solution for serialized shipment container tracking, extending its SAP Auto-ID Infrastructure for RFID reach to operational processes and workflows. Cephalon is an international biopharmaceutical company that has been testing RFID technology for the past three years to improve supply chain efficiency and visibility. RFID serialized container tracking will support efforts to combat counterfeiting as well as improve process execution.
OAT’s RFID solution was integrated with SAP Solution for RFID to enable serialized shipping container tracking and to set the foundation for tracking drug pedigrees. Cephalon has architected SAP Auto-ID Infrastructure as an extension of its core ERP processes for serialized product and containers to enrich standard processes around deliveries, advanced shipping notices, pick/pack/ship and handling.
This new project extends this architecture further and leverages the combined OAT and SAP solution to enable distribution center-based processes and workflows to track serialized shipping containers. OAT commissions and associates the RFID tags with specific containers and records the containers’ contents and attributes; SAP solutions provide process oversight, number range management and OAT provides operational workflow management. After processing, OAT reports back the shipping container’s EPC number and the details of its contents, enabling SAP business processes such as pharmaceutical advance shipping notices to be carried out automatically.
Source: RFID News
IPICO Inc. and McMaster RFID Applications Laboratory have been awarded a $1.2 million (Canadian dollars) grant to create an RFID system that would capture and analyze data related to traffic use and capacity, without a corresponding increase in investment in road infrastructure. The technology also could be used to help manage traffic, reducing road delays and transit time, and then reduce both emissions and dependency on fossil fuels.
Alanco Technologies has announced that its subsidiary Alanco/TSI Prism, a provider of real-time RFID tracking technologies, has won a $3.3 million contract to create an RFID-based inmate tracking system for the Washington D.C. Department of Corrections.
The Chinese Olympic Committee has offered more details about the RFID-enabled tickets being issued for the Beijing Olympics this summer. All tickets to the opening and closing ceremonies will include RFID tags containing personal information about the ticket holder, including passport information and home and e-mail addresses.
The New Zealand government has pledged $23.3 million (New Zealand dollars) to create a system of mandatory RFID-tagging for all of the country’s farm-raised cattle and deer by 2011. The funding for the biosecurity project will cover its set-up costs, with a new tax likely to be levied to support operational costs.