Autonomous Mobile Robot Navigation Using Passive RFID in Indoor Environment

TLDR

RFID‑based localization suffers from inherent antenna and tag uncertainties, leading to errors tied to the antenna’s sensing area, and few studies have explored purely RFID‑driven navigation. The study proposes an efficient method for localizing and estimating the pose of a mobile robot using passive RFID. The algorithm identifies IC tags, applies trigonometric calculations to the tags’ Cartesian coordinates on a regular grid, and uses the change between successive tag detections to compute the robot’s pose. Experiments demonstrate that the method accurately estimates the robot’s location and pose during navigation.

Abstract

This paper proposes an efficient method for localization and pose estimation for mobile robot navigation using passive radio-frequency identification (RFID). We assume that the robot is able to identify IC tags and measure the robot's pose based on the relation between the previous and current location according to the IC tags. However, there arises the problem of uncertainty of location due to the nature of the antenna and IC tags. In other words, an error is always present which is relative to the sensing area of the antenna. Many researches have used external sensors in order to reduce the location errors, with few researches presented involving purely RFID driven systems. Our proposed algorithm that uses only passive RFID is able to estimate the robot's location and orientation more precisely by using trigonometric functions and the IC tags' Cartesian coordinates in a regular gridlike pattern. The experimental results show that the proposed method effectively estimates both the location and the pose of a mobile robot during navigation.