Last September, Aquatic Behavioral Technologies (ABT) began leasing its E-Bait devices, which emit sounds intended to lure spiny lobsters into the traps of fishermen in the Caribbean and Florida. To track each box-shaped unit as it travels from the factory to the distributor, onto boats, underwater and back to the distributor again, the company has fitted each one with a passive EPC Gen 2 RFID tag. As a result, ABT can better manage its inventory of Lobster Callers from its home office in Atlanta.
A lobster fisherman places the gadget in a lobster pot, then lowers it under the water, where it “calls” to lobsters, luring them into the cage. ABT manufactures the devices, leasing them to lobstermen at a monthly rate.
Every 40 days, the lobstermen must bring the units to a local fishing-supply distributor for battery recharging. ABT pays the distributors to recharge and redistribute the Lobster Callers. After the units begin losing their charge, fishermen check them in at a participating distributor, which issues replacements and recharges those that have been returned. Without an automated tracking system, it would be difficult for ABT to manage which fishermen had which devices, who might have stolen another lobsterman’s units, or even who might be missing devices and have failed to return them all.
Billing would be another problem without the automated system, says ABT CEO Jeremy Black, because the company would be reliant on each distributor to keep track of how many devices every lobstermen checked out, and for how long. With hundreds of units going in and out of a distribution center at a time, it would be easy for a lobsterman to bring back the wrong quantity of units, or even someone else’s. The company considered using bar-coded tags to identify individual Lobster Callers, but did not believe the bar codes would remain readable after being submerged in seawater, where barnacles can quickly grow onto the sides of the devices and obscure a tag.
At an RFID conference last year, Black says, he met with Kevin Price, CEO of software developer and integrator AccuCode, and together they began devising a plan. “They needed a way to track the devices that would require no sophisticated knowledge or training for distributors,” Price explains.
Within about six weeks, Black recalls, an RFID system was set in place that could track each E-Bait device in real-time from the point of manufacture to the specific lobster fisherman to whom it had been leased.
When assembling the devices in a Colorado factory, ABT employees place a passive Motorola EPC Gen 2 RFID tag with a unique ID number into a unit and seal it up. This keeps the tag dry, even underwater. ABT personnel then move cases containing 24 units apiece past a Motorola XR480 stationary RFID interrogator, which captures all the ID numbers. That data is sent via a wireless Internet connection directly from the reader to an ABT server in Atlanta, where the data is stored.
The units are shipped to one of three current distributor locations, in Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands or the Florida Keys. An ABT staff member presses a prompt on the reader, indicating for which distributor a particular case of Lobster Callers is destined, then scans the ID numbers once more.
ABT provides distributors with two ID cards apiece, each containing an EPC Gen 2 tag. One card is used for checking in the devices a lobsterman has returned, or that arrive from ABT; the other is utilized to check out units given to the lobstermen. Like the distributor, each fisherman also has two cards—one for checking in the devices, another for receiving replacements. In this manner, ABT’s system can record what action is being taken at any given point in the process.
A distributor receiving a shipment employs a Motorola XR480 reader to scan the appropriate ID card, then scans the incoming devices to alert ABT that the specific units have been received. When returning units for recharging and picking up new ones, a lobsterman also scans the proper RFID ID card. The tags in the fisherman’s Lobster Callers are scanned in as well, linking that person with the units being returned. The process is repeated when a lobsterman is given units to replace those returned. Data is stored on a Web-based system hosted for ABT by a third party.
“We can use this system to know how much to bill the lobstermen,” Black says, by tracking exactly how many units are in that fisherman’s possession, and charging $10 a month per unit. The system also helps ABT determine how many devices the distributor recharges monthly, since the distributor gets paid $1 for each unit recharged.
“It couldn’t be easier for the distributors,” says Price. Once they receive an interrogator, he states, “they plug it in, set up the antennas and make sure there’s an Internet connection.” According to Price, the simplicity of the system “is a matter of defining workflow around the idea of eliminating keyboard entry. That’s where the ID cards come in.”
Price adds that “it’s a nice, clean, simple RFID system that just works,” noting that the entire system, including readers for the distributors, costs about $40,000. Black says he is happy with the system, but was disappointed at the rising cost of the RFID hardware and might shop for less expensive readers and antennas as he expands his system to other parts of the world.