An RFID Tracking System for Agricultural Safety

Abstract

This paper proposes a tracking system of workers operating in proximity of remote-control farm machineries (RCFMs) in agricultural and forestry working areas by aiming to enhance the operator safety. It consists of a passive Ultra-High-Frequency (UHF) Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) system where the RFID reader connected to an antenna array is installed on-board of RCFMs, whereas each worker is equipped with a pair of RFID tags placed at different heights. The onboard hardware is exploited to both measure the worker distance and the Direction of Arrival (DoA). The worker trajectory is then estimated with an Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) and an alarm is raised if the operator distance from the RCFM is is below an assigned threshold, thus stopping the dangerous manoeuvre. The work is part of the SMARTGRID Project co-funded by the Italian National Institute for Insurance against Accidents at Work (INAIL).