Clustag has launched COS Tunnel, an open architecture RAIN RFID tunnel designed to be fitted over a conveyor a warehouse already runs, rather than taking over a section of the line for itself. The Spanish company announced it from Madrid on 28 September 2026 and showed it publicly at RAIN in Action Madrid 2026, an international event dedicated to RAIN RFID technology.
Clustag is an RFID and intralogistics supplier based in Spain. Its existing range covers the MOT Station high performance tunnel, the standalone plug and play MOT Lite box tunnel, garment on hanger tunnels, pallet stations and in store devices, all tied to its ZENTUP data capture platform. RAIN RFID is the industry’s term for passive UHF RFID in the 860 to 960 MHz band, standardised as the GS1 EPC UHF Gen2 air interface and published as ISO/IEC 18000-63.
The deployment case, not the hardware
Read performance is rarely what kills an RFID tunnel project. A conventional tunnel expects its own stretch of conveyor, so the business case has to carry mechanical work on the line, a stoppage long enough to install and commission it, and a capital spend sized for both. In a distribution centre already running at capacity, any one of those three is enough to push the project into next year’s budget.
COS Tunnel is pitched squarely at that problem. Clustag’s own framing is that the tunnel adapts to the conveyor rather than making the operation adapt to the RFID system, which removes the structural changes that stretch deployment timescales and inflate cost. The company points it in particular at brownfield facilities, meaning existing buildings with existing kit, where productivity has to hold up while the technology goes in. Manolo Reguart, Clustag’s CEO, says the aim was not to produce a simpler version of the existing tunnels but to add a different proposition, for projects where flexibility, speed of integration and minimal disturbance to the infrastructure are what decide whether the work happens at all.
How it is set up
The tunnel is configurable in width, height and operating layout, and Clustag describes installation as three steps: measuring and configuring for the site, adapting the frame to the conveyor’s specifications, then connecting it and integrating the data. Inside, the company’s research and development team has built a wave emission and reading zone control system that concentrates reads within the area the parcel actually passes through, which is the usual defence against stray reads from tags sitting elsewhere on the line or in nearby racking. Performance is then tuned to the real variables of the site: conveyor speed, parcel density, the gap between boxes and the conditions of the working environment.
Data reaches the customer’s own systems through ZENTUP, Clustag’s capture platform, which connects to a WMS (warehouse management system), a WCS or WES (the control and execution software that drives automated equipment) or an ERP. Clustag claims real time capture at box level, structured and consistent output, immediate visual feedback for the operator at the line, and a traceable record of every validation event. The named applications are goods receiving, shipment validation on the way out, ecommerce and parcel handling, and consolidating multi item boxes, which covers most of what a retailer’s inbound and outbound logistics operation does with a conveyor.
Where it sits against MOT Station
Reguart is explicit that “COS Tunnel does not replace MOT Station”. MOT Station stays the choice where maximum accuracy, a controlled RF environment and validation in critical scenarios matter more than anything else. COS Tunnel is for operations that want to bring RFID in progressively, at a lower investment barrier and with less disruption to what is already installed.
The honest caveat is that Clustag has published nothing to judge that trade off by. There is no read rate, no throughput figure, no dimensions and no price for COS Tunnel, and no named customer or deployment as of 2 November 2026. Anyone weighing an over conveyor tunnel against a dedicated one will have to get those numbers from Clustag directly and test them against their own conveyor speed and parcel mix.
Read more at https://clustag.com/mot-lite/
