RF-pick: comparing order picking using a HUD with wearable RFID verification to traditional pick methods

Thomas, Charu; Panagiotopoulos, Theodore; Kotipalli, Pramod; Haynes, Malcolm; Starner, Thad

RF-pick: comparing order picking using a HUD with wearable RFID verification to traditional pick methods

Date

2018-10-08

Authors

Thomas, Charu

Panagiotopoulos, Theodore

Kotipalli, Pramod

Haynes, Malcolm

Starner, Thad

Publisher

ACM

Abstract

Order picking accounts for 55% of the annual $60 billion spent on warehouse operations in the United States. Reducing human-induced errors in the order fulfillment process can save warehouses and distributors significant costs. We investigate a radio-frequency identification (RFID)-based verification method wherein wearable RFID scanners, worn on the wrists, scan passive RFID tags mounted on an item's bin as the item is picked; this method is used in conjunction with a head-up display (HUD) to guide the user to the correct item. We compare this RFID verification method to pick-to-light with button verification, pick-to-paper with barcode verification, and pick-to-paper with no verification. We find that pick-to-HUD with RFID verification enables significantly faster picking, provides the lowest error rate, and provides the lowest task workload.

Keywords

Human-centered computing

Citation

Charu Thomas, Theodore Panagiotopoulos, Pramod Kotipalli, Malcolm Haynes, and Thad Starner. 2018. RF-pick: comparing order picking using a HUD with wearable RFID verification to traditional pick methods. In Proceedings of the 2018 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC '18). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 168–175. https://doi.org/10.1145/3267242.3267290