# ArmTenna: Two-Armed RFID Explorer for Dynamic Warehouse Management

## TL;DR

ArmTenna is a robotic system that improves RFID inventory tracking in warehouses by actively controlling sensing and exploration.

## Contribution

The paper introduces ArmTenna, a robotic platform that actively optimizes RFID sensing and exploration using multi-modal frontier evaluation.

## Key findings

- ArmTenna achieves 97% map coverage in warehouse zones compared to 72% for a baseline system.
- The system reduces missed-tag regions by integrating active sensing with exploration decisions.

## Abstract

Efficient RFID spatial exploration in dynamic warehouse environments is challenging due to occlusions, sensing geometry constraints, and the weak coupling between information acquisition and navigation decisions. Many existing inventory robots treat RFID sensing as a passive data source during exploration, without explicitly optimizing sensing pose or prioritizing inventory-driven frontiers, which can result in incomplete coverage and redundant traversal. This paper presents ArmTenna, an articulated mobile robotic platform that formulates RFID inventory exploration as an active perception problem. The system integrates dual 4-DOF robotic arms carrying directional UHF RFID antennas and a 2-DOF neck-mounted RGB-D camera, enabling adaptive interrogation of candidate regions. We propose a multi-modal frontier exploration framework that combines newly detected EPC tags, average RSSI values, and vision-based product detections into a composite utility function for goal selection. By embedding articulated antenna control directly into the frontier evaluation loop, the robot tightly couples sensing geometry with exploration decisions. Experimental validation with 150 tagged items across three separated warehouse zones shows that ArmTenna achieves up to 97% map coverage, compared to 72% for a baseline platform, while reducing missed-tag regions. These results demonstrate that integrating active sensing pose control with multi-modal frontier evaluation provides an effective and scalable solution for RFID-driven warehouse inventory automation.