Towards an autonomous industry 4.0 warehouse: A UAV and blockchain-based system for inventory and traceability applications in big data-driven supply chain management

TL;DR

This work tackles autonomous inventory and traceability in Industry 4.0 by integrating an RFID-enabled UAV with a blockchain and decentralized storage backbone. The proposed modular architecture uses OrbitDB on IPFS for distributed data and Ethereum smart contracts for tamper-evident provenance, enabling audits and decentralized access. Real-world experiments in a warehouse demonstrate significantly faster data collection than manual methods and show potential for item localization via SSI, while also evaluating the performance and scalability of the decentralized database and blockchain layers under varied network conditions. The approach offers practical impact for scalable, secure, and auditable supply chains in big data contexts, though it highlights ongoing challenges in blockchain throughput and latency for time-critical operations.

Abstract

In this paper we present the design and evaluation of a UAV-based system aimed at automating inventory tasks and keeping the traceability of industrial items attached to Radio-Frequency IDentification (RFID) tags. To confront current shortcomings, such a system is developed under a versatile, modular and scalable architecture aimed to reinforce cyber security and decentralization while fostering external audits and big data analytics. Therefore, the system uses a blockchain and a distributed ledger to store certain inventory data collected by UAVs, validate them, ensure their trustworthiness and make them available to the interested parties. In order to show the performance of the proposed system, different tests were performed in a real industrial warehouse, concluding that the system is able to obtain the inventory data really fast in comparison to traditional manual tasks, while being also able to estimate the position of the items when hovering over them thanks to their tag's signal strength. In addition, the performance of the proposed blockchain-based architecture was evaluated in different scenarios.

Figures (20)

• Figure 1: Technological evolution of identification tags.
• Figure 2: Proposed communications architecture.
• Figure 3: UAV used for the inventory and traceability system.
• Figure 4: Implemented architecture.
• Figure 5: Inventory data insertion process and implemented architecture.