SBIR Phase II: New 5G and internet-of-things systems for tracking and identification in shipping

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will advance new real-time tracking technologies that increase the efficiency and reduce the costs of container shipping across the world. The container shipping industry underpins the modern supply chain and represents a $1.5 B market. The proposed solution introduces 5G internet-of-things to tracking in worldwide shipping by demonstrating performance in the dirty, complex, and highly-cluttered environments of repair facilities and terminals crowded with container stacks. The intellectual merit of this project will be the continued exploration of backscattered mm-wave radio frequency identification (RFIDs) for localization and communication. In addition, although hardware and standards used for standard ultra-high frequency RFID-based localization systems have benefited from decades of improvements, methods appropriate for higher-frequency methods are virtually unexplored and feature radically different challenges. This effort will advance the tag and reader hardware and software, followed by optimization of the standard for the concurrent localization and communications with mm-wave backscatter tags. Finally, the project will conduct verification and validation of the mm-RFID system's mechanical and functional performance. 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.