SBIR Phase II: A Handheld Fine-Grained Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) Localization System for Retail Automation

The broader impact of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to help US retailers and consumers save billions of dollars, while enhancing the technological competitiveness and sustainability of the United States of America. Specifically, this project will improve labor efficiency for retailers, thus alleviating the $27B labor shortage they face today. By cutting labor costs, the product would not only help retailers but also tame retail inflation to end-consumers. Furthermore, by introducing cost-effective solutions to brick-and-mortar retailers, this project will boost their competitiveness with e-commerce giants, resulting in better quality and prices and higher customer satisfaction. The developed technology will also help supply chain operations become more sustainable by enabling industries to reduce excess inventory, improve end-of-life item returns, and repurpose old goods. Finally, the project will bring a new generation of indoor positioning technologies to the retail and supply chain sectors, elevating the experience for retail workers and shoppers. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project seeks to design, build, and evaluate a system for inventory tracking in retail stores by leveraging mobile radio frequency (RF) identification (RFID) technology. The proposed plan has multiple technical objectives: (1) developing computer vision machine learning models for automatic map creation and updates, (2) designing algorithms for robust self-localization of the handheld mobile device indoors, (3) developing RF-visual sensor fusion algorithms for item-level 3D localization, and (4) developing augmented reality-based user interfaces for scanning and navigating indoor environments. The technical contributions will go beyond designing the algorithms to implementing them on a mobile-to-cloud platform and evaluating them in real retail stores. This project will advance the state-of-the-art in indoor positioning and mapping, impacting the fields of mobile vision, RF localization, split computing, and human computer interaction. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.