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Navy Reaps Multiple Savings from Radio Frequency Identification

Navy News Service

Story Number: NNS110401-02
4/1/2011

By Dan Broadstreet, Naval Surface Warfare Center Panama City Division Public Affairs

PANAMA CITY, Fla. (NNS) -- Naval Surface Warfare Center Panama City Division (NNSWC PCD) and the Office of Naval Research's Ocean (ONR) Battlespace Sensing Department announced March 28 that the team intends to demonstrate efficient Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology by June.

The NNSWC PCD Automation, Dynamics and Special Programs Branch teamed with ONR will leverage the same RFID technology that has sped up grocery store inventories and cash-register lines to help relieve Sailors from manually inventorying thousands of items, whether ashore or aboard a ship.

The team is specifically working to reduce the workload aboard one of the Navy's newest and most highly automated ships, the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS). According to Dr. Sam Taylor, NSWC PCD Branch Head, because the LCS is modular and highly automated, it will operate with fewer crewmembers making the RFID technology and important addition.

"We've been researching ways to reduce the workload for LCS's crew," said Taylor "With fewer crewmembers, our objective is to empower them to focus more on mission critical tasks instead of the more mundane and time consuming tasks; tasks like conducting manual inventories."

This technology, which works easily inside a typical industrial warehouse, has not traditionally worked as well inside the metal environments aboard ships.

"The biggest technical challenge is to develop a technology that will work inside the enclosed metal tool boxes that are used to store most of the components within the standard metal shipping containers," said Dale Rhinehart, an NSWC PCD project engineer. "It's an environment naturally hostile to radio frequencies."

The challenge of using RFID technology on an LCS has been addressed by a system called the Mission Package Automated Inventory System. This system includes a customized reconfigurable antenna that, unlike RFID technology, allows it to function properly within the confines of a metal toolbox.

The LCS Mission Module Automation team has already successfully tested the system on the Remote Mine Hunting System (RMS). The RMS support container has approximately 3,000 parts and, using the MPAIS system, testers were able to inventory the container in less than a minute with a 96 percent rate of accuracy.

NSWC PCD Software Engineer Jeremy Hatcher explained the technology of the RFID tags.

"Basically, we use a small tag that looks like the typical bar code sticker you would see in a retail store. The difference is that the RFID tag has a microchip and very small antennae embedded within it. The tag works by absorbing power transmitted by the RFID reader to then retransmit a 24-digit hexadecimal code that uniquely identifies the associated tool in our system's database; much the same as industry, except our antennas are customized to function inside the metal environments aboard ship," said Hatcher.

Hatcher added that their custom system has proven reliable during its development.

Once the technology is fully in place, the MPAIS will be installed in all of the support containers aboard the LCS and will be interfaced with the Mission Package Support Facility in Port Hueneme, Calif. All of the containers on the ship can be networked together and the MPAIS has the capability to perform an inventory from any remote location on the ship or anywhere with a network connection.