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One third of humans' life is spent at work, therefore, the last decades have seen an increasing interest of companies in guaranteeing safety and security to employees in their plants, offices and industries. One of the paradigms that has mostly contributed to the transformation of the interest into real interventions is the Internet of Things that, thanks to its multitude of connected devices have enhanced various daily employees' routines and activities. Although different solutions have already been proposed to this aim they are usually focused on verifying the operation of the entire industrial plant without any specific attention to the respect of 'micro'-measures, like the closure of a gate. In this paper we propose a modular architecture, designed within the SENERGY Project, with the aim of supporting the energizing and de-energizing of a set of industrial machines and guaranteeing, at the same time, the safety of workers in their maintenance duties. Specifically, the paper is focused on the exploitation of a remote device controllable through a 2.4 Ghz radio interface to both monitor the respect of specific safety measures and promptly intervene in case of necessity. A prototype is implemented through a commercial fast-prototyping device used to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed solution and open up to future works.

In this work, three promising Additive Manufacturing (AM)/3D-printing technologies, able to realize conductive elements, are adopted in the realization of antennas. The selected techniques are Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF), Aerosol Jet® Printing (AJ®P), and Laser-Induced Graphene (LIG), which have been compared by measuring the performance of an ultrahigh (UHF) radiofrequency identification (RFID) tag, specifically designed, and realized for the scope. Results have also been analyzed against to data obtained by a reference sample realized in Aluminum. The FFF tag has been manufactured by extruding the Electrifi conductive filament over an ABS printed substrate, used also for the AJ®P-made antenna. Conversely, the LIG tag has been produced by laser-burning a Kapton® polyimide sheet. All the tested technologies, each one with its pros and cons, allowed to realize working prototypes, even if, as expected, with performance lower than the comparison sample. An electroplating process has been also adopted to increase conductivity, with improvements in the FFF prototype. The obtained results are quite satisfactory. Those related to LIG technology do not yet guarantee performance comparable to the other techniques. Nevertheless, the prospect of creating “green” and cost-effective antennas pushes towards further studies, already underway, which include the study of antenna shapes more suitable for the specific technique as well as process optimizations to increase conductivity. ispartof: IEEE Journal of Radio Frequency Identification vol:6 status: Published online

Recently, different solutions leveraging Internet of Things (IoT) technologies have been adopted to avoid accidents in agricultural working environments. As an example, heavy vehicles, e.g., tractors or excavators, have been upgraded with remote controls. Nonetheless, the community continues to encourage discussions on safety issues. In this framework, a localization system installed on remote-controlled farm machines (RCFM) can help in preventing fatal accidents and reduce collision risks. This paper presents an innovative system that exploits passive UHF-RFID technology supported by commercial BLE Beacons for monitoring and preventing accidents that may occur when ground-workers in RCFM collaborate in outdoor agricultural working areas. To this aim, a modular architecture is proposed to locate workers, obstacles and machines and guarantees the security of RCFM movements by using specific notifications for ground-workers prompt interventions. Its main characteristics are presented with its main positioning features based on passive UHF-RFID technology. An experimental campaign discusses its performance and determines the best configuration of the UHF-RFID tags installed on workers and obstacles. Finally, system validation demonstrates the reliability of the main components and the usefulness of the proposed architecture for worker safety.

New possibilities in antenna and microwave manufacturing are opening up through the exploitation of additive manufacturing (AM) 3D printing techniques. Despite being used primarily for the fabrication of dielectric structures, with the right filament, these procedures could also be able to print conductive parts, giving birth to true fully-3D-printed radiating elements. However, to take full advantage of these thermoplastic materials, a rigorous electromagnetic characterization needs to be performed. Based on this, the dielectric properties of one of the most common plastic 3D-printable materials are investigated, and, in addition, the electric conductivity of one of the most promising conductive filaments (Electrifi) is experimentally evaluated in a wide frequency range (0.5-7.5 GHz) and then validated in the design of different fully-3D-printable patch antennas.

One of the most promising and exciting research fields of the last decade is that of 3D-printed antennas, as proven by the increasing number of related scientific papers. More specifically, the most common and cost-effective 3D printing technologies, which have become more and more widespread in recent years, are particularly suitable for the development of dielectric resonator antennas (DRAs), which are very interesting types of antennas exhibiting good gain, excellent efficiency, and potentially very small size. After a brief survey on how additive manufacturing (AM) can be used in 3D printing of antennas and how much the manufacturing process of DRAs can benefit from those technologies, a specific example, consisting of a wideband antenna operating at 2.4 GHz and 3.8 GHz, was deeply analyzed, realized, and tested. The obtained prototype exhibited compact size (60 × 60 × 16 mm3, considering the whole antenna) and a good agreement between measured and simulated S11, with a fractional bandwidth of 46%. Simulated gain and efficiency were also quite good, with values of 5.45 dBi and 6.38 dBi for the gain and 91% and 90% for the efficiency, respectively, at 2.45 GHz and 3.6 GHz.