March 22, 2006—After more than three years of targeted research, Vorwerk Teppichwerke has successfully developed the first “smart” floor to series-production capability, says the company. 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.”
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 coordinates to a robot, it can also store data, e.g., for purposes of quality control.
In the future, the smart floor system is going to be of particular interest for buildings with a high degree of transport activities, for instance hospitals or nursing homes. In this case the deployment of entire fleets of robots is conceivable in order to spare personnel repetitive long distances. One conceivable example is that smart floor controls the automated transport of empty beds to the basement for cleaning.
Equally feasible is the system’s ability to take over the navigation of transport robots for meals, bedclothes, medication or in-house mail.
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