Experiments on a novel modular cost-effective RFID-based mobile robot navigation system

Abstract

Mobile robot navigation using an analog signal strength of a Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) device is a promising alternative of different types of robot navigation methods in the state of the art. Skilled navigation in mobile robotics usually requires solving two problems: the knowledge of the position of the robot, and a motion control strategy. Moreover, when no prior knowledge of the environment is available, the problem becomes even more challenging, since the robot has to build a map of its surroundings as it moves. These three problems ought to be solved in conjunction, since they are interdependent. The objective of this manuscript is to introduce an innovative cost-effective mobile robot navigation strategy using the features of a specific analog signal from an RFID system. The proposed navigation method is easily implementable on virtually any indoor robotic system with a low computational complexity. Numerical computer simulations are carried out to illustrate the performance of the proposed scheme.

A Mobile Robot Navigation System Using RFID Technology

“…The simulations are conducted using the 3-D simulation platform Simbad. 1 The robot's workspace considered in the simulation is an external obstacle-free environment with all the RFID tags attached to a 3 m height ceiling. It is important to point out that it is not the aim of this research to tackle the obstacle avoidance problem.…”

“…Step 4: The phase difference,∆φ, of the destination tag'ssignal is calculated as defined in (1). ∆φ is then passed to the FLC to quantize the tuneup the robot has to apply to its direction to better direct itself towards its destination.…”

An RFID-Based robot navigation system with a customized RFID tag architecture

“…The terms CW (Clock Wise), Zero and CCW (Counter Clock Wise) are the fuzzy labels opted for the output variable ∆θ. Three fuzzy rules are set to reflect the fact that the angle φ is positive when the transmitting transponder in on the left side of the RFID reader and vice versa [6]. These rules are defined as follows:…”

“…Once the robot reaches the first target, it follows the same procedure to reach the subsequent targets in the desired path. To the best of our knowledge, except the work of Gueaieb and Miah [6], all the RFID-based techniques proposed in the literature to date navigation are used in a localization context, and cannot be directly applied to navigation. It is worth mentioning that the work presented herein is the first attempt to use RFID technology as a means of navigation.…”

Indoor Localization Systems — Tracking Objects and Personnel with Sensors, Wireless Networks and RFID

“…A commercialized prototype of the superdistributed RFID infrastructure called "Smart Floor" [27] has been developed by German carpet and vacuum cleaner company Vorwerk, guiding their robot vacuum cleaners to perform cleaning work or transporting goods and persons ( Figure 4). Recently Gueaieb and Miah [28] proposed an approach to estimate the angle between the mobile target orientation and the direction of a particular tag relative to it. Their mobile target is equipped with a passive reader with one transmitting antenna in the middle and two receiving antenna at both sides, the reader is designed to be capable of computing the phase information of the signals received.…”