The grand opening of the new Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Laboratory was held at 1530 E. Glenn Ave. at 1 p.m.
The laboratory was made possible by a collaborative effort from its sponsors, various Auburn students, RFID lab employees from the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering, the Raymond J. Harbert College of Business and the College of Human Sciences.
RFID is the primary area of research students in the lab are working on.
“This is an exciting time for our University as we open the program,” said Tim Boosinger, provost and vice president for Academic Affairs. “From the University’s perspective when we think about centers, a center should embody the land grant mission – and this project clearly does. The discoveries made by RFID center will position Auburn as a leader in distributive technologies, and will change the landscape of consumer-based industries.”
According to Boosinger, the work of the RFID center will examine the drivers and outcomes of consumer behavior, managerial practices and organizational dynamics to show how they influence people.
“The lab officially started in 2005," said Bill Hardgrave, dean of the College of Business. "As the lab continued to grow in reputation and in its scope, we were approached a couple of years ago with the idea of moving the lab from the University of Arkansas to Auburn. I’m very proud we were able to pull it off.”
According to the RFID lab’s Auburn website, the lab facility is a 13,000 square foot area modeling warehouse, distribution and grocery formats. Tours of the lab will include viewings of retail innovations and demonstrations. The lab is open to all interested parties.
When thinking of RFID, think of the barcode scanners at local retail stores that scan manufactured products such as cosmetics, apparel, grocery items, electronics and jewelry. Now, these goods can be tagged with RFID tags instead of barcode. RFID allows items to be scanned wirelessly to transmit data from tags on products for improved data handling.
In a demonstration conducted by Senthil Chinnappa Gounder, the director of technology at the RFID Lab, a cart containing cardboard boxes of clothing items was pushed through two wall-mounted RFID scanners. On a nearby screen, the number of items with RFID tags in the boxes were detected all at once and recorded wirelessly without the boxes ever being opened. According to the screen, the scanners detected 200 items inside the boxes in less than one second, and recorded each item’s identification on-screen. Traditional barcode scanners scan barcodes one at a time.
Using RFID, items can be identified quickly through wireless transmission, tracked in digitally projected maps like a GPS, and recorded electronically.
The guest speaker for the lab’s opening, Dave Clark, is the senior vice president of world operations and customer service at Amazon and is a1996 Auburn alumnus.
“Even as long as RFID has been around, we’re still in the very early stages of driving the complete adoption through the supply chain and finding all of the creative uses that can be done with this technology,”Clark said.
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