Experimental characterization of RFID systems for process control in industrial marble machines

Abstract

The paper presents an experimental characterization of wireless systems, specifically RFID technologies, applied to polishing/cutting process control in the marble industry. The application of RFID systems has the final aim of allowing the automatic and contact-less detection of the presence of a marble slab in different points of a marble machine, outside and/or inside, trying to overcome some limitations of the currently used proximity detectors. Slab detection is needed for the process control in order to properly activate the abrasive or cutting heads of the machine. Four RFID systems at 125 kHz, 13.56 MHz, 868 MHz and 2.45 GHz have been tested in different set-ups representative of those found in marble machines. Starting from commercially available tags, readers and antennas, ad-hoc developed or customized hardware and/or software have been used for the experimental test campaign, that has been carried out also considering dirty and wet working environments representative of those found in real applications.