Indoor Localisation of Humans, Objects, and mobile Robots with RFID Infrastructure

Abstract

The need for robust indoor localisation for all types of entities has been under continuous research by the ubiquitous community. Intelligent environments have to be supported with contextual information in order to facilitate intelligent behaviour. These contextual information include the location of humans and objects within the particular environment. Intelligent environments can be living areas with home automation, smart industrial plants, sensor-equipped office areas and indoor-emergency applications. So far technical solutions are either quite expensive or lack of precision for robust usage as components in intelligent service federations. We present rather low-cost localisation systems with great scalability based on active and passive RFID technology to locate humans, mobile service robots and objects of the daily use. The trade-off between technical effort and costs on the one hand and sufficient data accuracy for the application on the other hand is discussed. A motivation of our scenario, the technical concept and solution as well as the implementation and the integration that so far have been performed will be presented. Current prototypes of the proposed system are already being tested in a project aiming on development of smart assisted living environments.