How Inexpensive RFID Is Revolutionizing the Supply Chain: (Innovations Case Narrative: The Electronic Product Code)

Like the electric, water, and information networks most of modern society relies on, there is another network, one far less visible, that makes modern life possible: the global supply chain. Almost every physical product that is grown, manufactured, or packaged arrives at a store or at our home through a series of transfers involving ships, planes, trains, and trucks. In between, products may be aggregated into pallets and containers; moved with cranes or forklifts; stored in ports, warehouses, or on shelves; kept secure in armored vehicles or vaults; kept fresh in refrigerated storage or “reefer” transportation units; and packaged, repackaged, or finished before they get into our hands. Supply-chain management, which involves everything from the sourcing and procurement of materials to logistics, is a major part of the U.S. economy. In 2011, U.S. business logistics costs totaled $1.28 trillion and accounted for 8.5 percent of the GDP

Light scattering and transmission measurement using digital imaging for online analysis of constituents in milk

Milk is an emulsion of fat globules and casein micelles dispersed in an aqueous medium with dissolved lactose, whey proteins and minerals. Quantification of constituents in milk is important in various stages of the dairy supply chain for proper process control and quality assurance. In field-level applications, spectrophotometric analysis is an economical option due to the low-cost of silicon photodetectors, sensitive to UV/Vis radiation with wavelengths between 300 - 1100 nm. Both absorption and scattering are witnessed as incident UV/Vis radiation interacts with dissolved and dispersed constituents in milk. These effects can in turn be used to characterize the chemical and physical composition of a milk sample. However, in order to simplify analysis, most existing instrument require dilution of samples to avoid effects of multiple scattering. The sample preparation steps are usually expensive, prone to human errors and unsuitable for field-level and online analysis. This paper introduces a novel digital imaging based method of online spectrophotometric measurements on raw milk without any sample preparation. Multiple LEDs of different emission spectra are used as discrete light sources and a digital CMOS camera is used as an image sensor. The extinction characteristic of samples is derived from captured images. The dependence of multiple scattering on power of incident radiation is exploited to quantify scattering. The method has been validated with experiments for response with varying fat concentrations and fat globule sizes. Despite of the presence of multiple scattering, the method is able to unequivocally quantify extinction of incident radiation and relate it to the fat concentrations and globule sizes of samples

PointGrow: Autoregressively Learned Point Cloud Generation with Self-Attention

Generating 3D point clouds is challenging yet highly desired. This work presents a novel autoregressive model, PointGrow, which can generate diverse and realistic point cloud samples from scratch or conditioned on semantic contexts. This model operates recurrently, with each point sampled according to a conditional distribution given its previously-generated points, allowing inter-point correlations to be well-exploited and 3D shape generative processes to be better interpreted. Since point cloud object shapes are typically encoded by long-range dependencies, we augment our model with dedicated self-attention modules to capture such relations. Extensive evaluations show that PointGrow achieves satisfying performance on both unconditional and conditional point cloud generation tasks, with respect to realism and diversity. Several important applications, such as unsupervised feature learning and shape arithmetic operations, are also demonstrated

A novel communication method for semi-passive RFID based sensors

This paper presents a novel communication method for semi-passive RFID based sensors. The new method uses a digitally reconfigurable UHF RFID tag antenna to modulate sensed information at an RFID tag on to the received signal strength indicator (RSSI) response perceived at an RFID reader. This technique is completely compatible with the existing class 1 generation 2 UHF air interface protocol thereby enabling the use of existing RFID reader infrastructure to decode the additional sensed information. The effect of read distance, environment and bit duration on the performance of the communication method is examined through measurements obtained from a prototype. Through experimental verification, it is demonstrated that error free transmission of sensor information can be achieved up to 3.5 meters in different environments with a bit duration of 500 ms. Prospective future research directions are also discussed

Proof of Travel for Trust-Based Data Validation in V2I Communication Part I: Methodology

Previous work on misbehavior detection and trust management for Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication can identify falsified and malicious messages, enabling witness vehicles to report observations about high-criticality traffic events. However, there may not exist enough "benign" vehicles with V2X connectivity or vehicle owners who are willing to opt-in in the early stages of connected-vehicle deployment. In this paper, we propose a security protocol for the communication between vehicles and infrastructure, titled Proof-of-Travel (POT), to answer the research question: How can we transform the power of cryptography techniques embedded within the protocol into social and economic mechanisms to simultaneously incentivize Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) data sharing activities and validate the data? The key idea is to determine the reputation of and the contribution made by a vehicle based on its distance traveled and the information it shared through V2I channels. In particular, the total vehicle miles traveled for a vehicle must be testified by digital signatures signed by each infrastructure component along the path of its movement. While building a chain of proofs of spatial movement creates burdens for malicious vehicles, acquiring proofs does not result in extra cost for normal vehicles, which naturally want to move from the origin to the destination. The proof of travel for a vehicle can then be used to determine the contribution and reward by its altruistic behaviors. We propose short-term and long-term incentive designs based on the POT protocol and evaluate their security and performance through theoretical analysis and simulations

Local Viscosity Control Printing for High-Throughput Additive Manufacturing of Polymers

Fused deposition modeling's (FDM) throughput is limited by process physics as well as practical considerations favoring single-head polymer extrusion. To expedite the thermoplastic additive manufacturing process, we propose a parallelized material deposition process called local viscosity control (LVC) additive manufacturing. LVC prints an entire layer in one step by selectively modulating the viscosity of polymer feedstock in contact with a heated wire mesh. Layers of molten polymer are contact printed, with the relative motion between the wire mechanism and a build plate allowing wetting and surface tension to transfer selectively heated, lower viscosity regions of polymer to a fixed substrate. Experiments demonstrate the viability of this process using a single cell depositing layered polycarbonate pixels. Theoretical analysis shows this process may offer similar capabilities in resolution to conventional FDM with a significantly higher production rate for commonly available input power