A Passive UHF-RFID System for the Localization of an Indoor Autonomous Vehicle

TLDR

The study proposes a global localization system that fuses odometry data with RFID readings. It employs ceiling‑mounted UHF RFID tags detected by a mobile robot below, uses only tag detection with a sparse tag density, and fuses these observations with odometry through a Kalman filter. The system achieves an average position error of about 0.1 m, proving to be a cheap and easy‑to‑deploy solution for industrial and domestic applications.

Abstract

A global localization system combining odometry data with radio frequency identification (RFID) readings is proposed. RFID tags are placed at the ceiling of the environment and can be detected by a mobile robot unit traveling below them. The detection of the tags is the only information used in the proposed approach (no distance or bearing to the tag is considered available), but differently from similar localization setups reported in the literature, only a small number (about one each square meter or less) of tags are used. This is possible using a suitable tag's antenna in ultrahigh frequency band, expressly designed to obtain regular and stable RFID detection regions, which allows us to consider an efficient Kalman filtering approach to fuse RFID readings with the vehicle odometry data. A satisfactory performance is achieved, with an average position error of about 0.1 m. The hardware/software localization setup described in this paper is cheap and easy to use and may provide a satisfactory approach in several industrial and domestic scenarios.