Ground_Support_October_2020 - 30

TECHNOLOGY

the slew of new technology as they check
their bags at Miami.
"We are proud to partner with the TSA
on this cutting-edge facility, which is one
of many enhancements coming soon as part
of our airport-wide renovation and expansion. Improvements like the new baggage
handling system will help MIA maintain
its position as the busiest airport in Florida
for international passengers," says Lester
Sola, Miami-Dade Aviation Department
director and CEO, at the system's unveiling last October.

Beyond the Bots
Tom Gebler, account director for airports at
SICK, anticipates AGVs having a growing
presence in bagging handling systems in
the near future.
"I honestly think that there will be uses
for AGVs in baggage handling systems. I
think you're going to see a lot more of it
in the next five or 10 years," says Gebler.
And while the future looms, in the
immediate, airports are improving their
baggage handling systems and increasing
efficiency by implementing technology
that's tried and true in new ways - RFID
and optical technology.

RFID, which stands for radio-frequency
identification, has been used for years in
the postal and retail industries, but didn't
begin gaining traction in baggage systems
until the late 2000s.
"RFID has been around as a technology
for actually quite a while. I'd like to say that
it's been possibly one of the most oversold
technologies in its more infancy years, but
it's really kind of come on strong as a great
technology for identifying items. One of the
big benefits in baggage for using RFID is
that you don't need a line of sight to read
the tag," says Gebler.
The technology works by utilizing
readers and antennas that emit a cloud of
electromagnetic energy. This energy field
excites a passive - no on-board battery or
source of power - RFID tag in the 902-928
MHz frequency range, for U.S. readers, and
once the RFID has been powered up by the
energy cloud, it wirelessly transmits its data
to the RFID reader, Gebler describes.
Optical readers, Gebler says, are camera-based systems using special imagers
that take multiple pictures per bag and
use sophisticated algorithms to locate and
decode the bar codes found on the baggage
tags. These images can also be processed

Photo courtesy of Daifuku Airport Technologies

A TSA worker performs a search with the help of an MIT

30 GROUND SUPPORT WORLDWIDE

OCTOBER 2020

by Optical Character Recognition to potentially improve read rates on highly damaged
codes and to extract the printed flight number and destination airport from the tag.
One issue that optical readers face is
something called "bag hygiene," where a
ticket is obscured from the reader's view.
"It's when the ticket counter agent puts a
bag on the belt, the tag may be obscured by
passenger's ID tags. Sometimes people will
put things on their bag to help them more
easily identify them, like ribbons and such,
that obstruct the view," Gebler explains.
"The one weakness of the optical readers
is that they need to physically see the tag."
RFID's drawbacks come from its lagging
adoption rate, due in part to the prior cost
of adopting the technology before it became
a widespread, multi-industry tool.
"The initial cost of RFID tags was much,
much higher. Now that we have so many
RFID tags produced per year for things like
the retail market, as well as some airline
applications, the cost of tags has come
down significantly," says Gebler.
However, the two technologies are often
combined into one hybrid system, allowing
for the best of both worlds and is often a
smart option for airports to choose when
revamping their baggage systems.
There are several reasons why airports
are installing hybrid systems. While a
given airport may not be currently utilizing RFID encoded tags, they want the
flexibility to move to RFID encoded tags
in the future; the airport may process a
lot of Delta bags, which are already RFID
encoded, and wants to take advantage of
improved read rates for those bags; and
even if the airport is generating its own
RFID encoded tags, it still needs to read bar
code-only tags produced at other airports.
Hybrid systems give them the flexibility to
support both technologies for many years
to come.
Gebler adds that SICK offers a hybrid
system that combines either lasers or cameras for reading the bar codes printed on
the outside of the tag and the RFID chip
and antenna inlay embedded in the tag. The
system arbitrates the reading between the
two identification technologies and sends
the correct data to the baggage handling
system.
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