Hamlin, Germany, March 14, 2006--After over three years of targeted research, Vorwerk Teppichwerke has successfully developed the first "smart" floor to series-production capability. A textile underlay, the smart floor is equipped with electronic radio frequency identification (RFID) microchips, and can be installed beneath nearly all suitable floor coverings.
As a result of the information stored on the chips, RFID robots are able to orientate themselves precisely toward targets on the flooring area, for example to take over automated cleaning or transport functions in buildings.
"Besides its significance as a design element, the additional use of the floor surface area in buildings has been at best confined to ventilation, heating and as the optical blind for cable and installation ducts," according to Johannes Schulte, chairman of executive management at Vorwerk Teppichwerke. "With the smart floor that area is now going to be given a whole new technical functionality. A milestone for advanced floor-covering solutions."
Smart floo" is the first product to be realized from the ongoing research project "thinking carpet" begun in 2003. That project has been run by Vorwerk jointly with chip manufacturer Infineon toward developing intelligent supplementary functions for textile floor coverings.
With the firm InMach Intelligente Maschinen GmbH from Ulm, Germany, a first co-operation partner has now been found. InMach specially designs intelligent robots for everyday service tasks such as cleaning work or transporting goods and persons. Effective immediately, Vorwerk and InMach are managing the advanced development of a marketable overall solution that envisages smart floor together with an RFID service robot.
The basis of the smart floor is a network consisting of RFID microchip "tags" which have been integrated into a polyester weave. This construction enables a trouble-free linkage of multiple underlays so that the RFID network can be installed in a space to cover any size.
The smart floor can be installed easily and invisibly beneath any suitable floor covering, for example a carpet. Each RFID tag within the network can be electromagnetically enscribed and read out. The tag is thus able not only to transmit locational co-ordinates to a robot, it can also store data, e.g., for purposes of quality control.
The RFID chip specially constructed for the smart floor underlay consists of an ultra-thin sheet of PET which has been equipped with metal conductors, an antenna coil and a tiny silicon microchip. Each of the RFID chip tags has its own ID number which can be detected and identified by an RFID reader via wireless data transmission (13.56 MHz) across a distance of 10 centimetres.
The power required for this process is supplied exclusively by the robot. The RFID chips themselves are completely passive, meaning that no electrical voltage whatsoever exists on the underlay itself.
Reading out the RFID chip tags allows the individual signal transmitters to be linked by the robot into a virtual map. The robot then moves precisely along the routing network formed in this manner toward a defined point or, when the situation deals with a cleaning robot, to move back and forth in a co-ordinated fashion to cover a space. A reading memory analyzes which targets have already been driven to, or which areas of a given surface have already been processed. It is also possible for the robot to enscribe date and time information onto the RFID chip. This opens up the possibility for a simple form of service control (quality management).
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