Application for Automated Inventory Management of Weapons and Related Assets

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is developing a system that uses a new inductive communication technology called RuBee™, to manage and inventory weapons housed in Department of Energy (DOE) armories. RuBee™ is under consideration as an IEEE Standard (P1902.1), and is being used on this project primarily because of its high performance when used in, on, and around metal; typical of an armory vault environment. The primary objective of this project is to supply sustainable technology that provides timely information on the status and location of weapons and related assets. This paper will focus on the design of the system, including software, hardware and field implementation. Various design choices will be discussed as they relate to the challenge of implementing this type of system in a working DOE armory.