The use of a Eureka
passive tagging system for World Golf Systems
What do you do if you are a keen golfer and you can't get to
the golf course? Up until now the only alternative would be
to go to a driving range. The problem is that a driving range
only allows you to practice your swing, you cannot gauge your
accuracy and you cannot play anybody else.
In 1998 Avonwood Developments were approached
by World Golf Systems to see if RFID could be used to take the
driving range concept a quantum leap further. The concept was
to use RFID tagged balls and a computer system to allocate balls
to a player and then record where the ball landed after being
played.
In October 2000 the first 'Top Golf' Game Centre successfully
opened at Watford.
The System - The ball
The first problem to overcome was tagging a golf ball in such
a way that the enormous forces generated when the ball is struck
did not damage the tag. An Avonwood 125 Khz 'Eureka' 111 tag
was chosen and placed in a specially designed enclosures. Initial
discussions with Dunlop progressed well, once it was understood
that the idea was not to tag balls for lost ball recovery purposes.
This would not have been too popular, as it would severely reduce
the golf ball manufacturers turnover!
The final successful tag enclosure design was arrived at after
much experimentation. A tagged ball now lasts as long as the
useful life of the ball in operating circumstances.
Issuing the Ball
To ensure that a player becomes known to the system there
has to be a way of electronically identifying him. The solution
was to issue him with a smart card containing another Eureka
tag, this is then used to identify the player to the ball
dispenser system utilising an RF smart card reader.
The ball dispenser is a standard system supplied
by Range Servant but an Avonwood 111 decoder incorporated into
the mechanism. The decoder has to have a one hundred per cent
successful read capability as each ball passes through the decoder
field. As passive RFID tags cannot be read when edge on to a
decoder field there was a need to come up with a unique method
of overcoming this problem. The solution was to make a special
device that rotated the ball as it passed through the field
thus ensuring that it would change its orientation during the
decoding process. After many thousands of repeated tests a reliable
system has been developed.
Playing the ball
Once the player has a bucket of tagged balls that have been
electronically identified as his, he needs to be able to play
each one.
Consequently the next problem to solve was how to reliably
identify each ball as it is placed on a tee. Once again a
one hundred per cent read capability with the tag in the ball
being in any orientation was specified. Avonwood have developed
a special antenna system that is placed underneath an Astro
turf driving mat. This antenna produces a cyclic RF Field
that overcomes the orientation problem and completely meets
the specification.
The player simply places his ball on the tee on the 'Smart
Mat' and a light illuminates to tell him it has been read
correctly. He is then free to play the ball onto the range
and into one of the many targets that are ahead of him, up
to 260 yards away.
Providing a score
World Golf have designed targets that are roughly the
size of a golf green but consist of a matrix of netting that
has a large number of holes for the ball to drop down into,
rather like a giant dart board. The next problem for Avonwood
was to produce a system to read the tag in the ball once it
had been collected by the target system in order to relay
a score back to the player. Once again the orientation problem
needed to be overcome as well as coping with the environmental
effects of being out in the open and operating for 365 days
of the year.
Avonwood have used a similar system to that used in the ball
dispenser to turn the ball as it moves through the field of
a decoder. As the ball is physically turned during this process,
it also is very resilient to other foreign matter blocking
the system i.e., dead leaves etc. These devices also separate
the balls so that they are read one at a time. As with the
dispensers a thoroughly reliable system has been produced.
The system
Having successfully designed several unique RFID systems Avonwood
were then left with the problem of making them all work together.
Each decoder has its own RF field operating at a set frequency
and it was very important to ensure that they did not interfere
with each other. The driving bays hold two decoder systems
each giving a total of 88 fields to synchronise. This was
achieved using one synchronisation system for the whole installation.
The bigger targets include 22 ball separator/decoder systems
and so each target system also had to be synchronised.
Conclusions
Faced with a customer with a unique idea, Avonwood had to
design an RFID solution that would make it become a reality.
In order to do so several totally new approaches to the use
of RFID tags and decoder systems had to be designed from scratch.
Within two years this was taken from concept to reality.
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