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The trend in industrial automation is to move towards fast and real-time identification, further improving the high-level of accuracy that is needed to enable continuous identification and monitoring. The interest in adopting radio frequency identification (RFID) technology for use in automation systems with minimal manual involvement is increasing rapidly. RFID systems are capable of providing real-time object visibility with high accuracy enabling continuous identification and location of all items and thereby providing accurate real-time data management instead of simple snapshots. In this paper, the use of multiple reader antennas is examined against collision and interference avoidance. Also, antenna operation is studied in typical industrial environments containing metallic objects or other conducting surfaces. In addition, this paper reviews different tag antennas and their characteristics for particular item identification cases. These cases include items made of specific materials that obstruct or prevent radio wave propagation by either absorbing or reflecting them. The results given in this paper are fully applicable with practical RFID solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Passive ultra high frequency (UHF) spectrum radio frequency identification (RFID) systems have numerous applications. Continuous research and development of RFID systems is carried out to study solutions for different challenging cases of identification. Metallic objects set challenges for identification due to the behavior of electromagnetic waves on conductive boundaries. Therefore, novel tag designs have been developed for identification of metallic objects. This article presents a performance comparison of two different metal-mountable tag antennas, which are printed inverted-F antenna (IFA) and microstrip patch antenna with photonic band gap (PBG) ground plane and with regular ground plane. The effects of size and shape of metallic objects on tag antenna performance are studied with read range measurements and compared between the tag antenna types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]