Search, Identification and Positioning of the Underground Manhole with RFID Ground Tag

Abstract

Road formation is the basic requirement of modern country. Manholes on the road are the main objects result in uneven surfaces. They are not only the killer of public safety, but also the main cause of national compensation; therefore, it is necessary to implement the underground manhole. However, it is not easy to search for the manhole from underground. Thus, it is essential to develop a set of searching, authentication, and precision positioning technologies. We analyze the pros and cons of metal detection, GPS location and RFID authentication approaches as well as their restrictions, of which the first two can only be used as navigational aids to arrive at the scene. While RFID can help to identify manholes, putting the manhole cover 20 cm below the asphalt concrete (AC) pavement creates more complications. Not only the reading distance is way too long for normal operation, but also the filling through the aquifer, and to avoid metal interference comes from the manholes, traditional RFID reader cannot achieve such purpose. Therefore special design is inevitable. In this paper, we analysis the RFID spectrum as well as the characteristics of binding RFID tags and metal. We than utilize the environmental characteristics of underground manhole, and design a special-purpose RFID tag -Ground Tag, in order to propose an integrated solution for searching, authentication and precision positioning of the underground manhole.

Passive Harmonic RFID System for Buried Assets Localization

“…Enhancement techniques for improving the detection of GPR signals based on antennas loaded with delay lines are proposed in the works of [ 17 , 18 ], obtaining detection depths of 1.1–1.2 m in dry soils. Recently, surface acoustic wave (SAW) RFID tags at 915 MHz have been proposed in the literature [ 51 ], obtaining a detection depth of 1.3 m. In the work of [ 24 ], UHF RFID metal tags are used for manhole detection. The highest depth underground that is detected is 10 cm.…”

“…The exact frequency band varies between 865 MHz and 954 MHz depending on the region. In this frame, specific tag antenna design with a high level of gain for underground localization applications has been reported in the works of [ 23 , 24 , 25 ]. Recently, smart floor applications such as indoor mapping, localization, and robot guidance have been proposed in the literature [ 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 ] using different RFID bands.…”

Customized Mobile LiDAR System for Manhole Cover Detection and Identification

“…Timofte et al [16] presented a multi-view scheme for manhole detection and recognition based on a van-mounted camera and global positioning system (GPS) for data acquisition, but this method was limited in its ability to detect manhole covers, and the ownership information could not be obtained due to the low image resolution. It is also slow and inconvenient to monitor all the manhole covers via radio-frequency identification tagging [17]. Murasaki et al [18] estimated the degree of manhole cover wear based on a texture recognition approach that used the local binary pattern feature of the image-processing method.…”

A Manhole Covers Intelligent Monitoring Terminal Based on Dual Frequency RFID and Acceleration Sensor

“…Usually, most of manhole covers have not the power supply conditions, therefore, the non-low-power technology could not be applied at here, such as, GPS, Zigbee, GPRS or 3G technology. Actually, in order to construct long term operation system, we can only choose the RFID technology to realize the goal [4,5].…”

“…Obviously, the manhole covers monitoring problem has not been completely resolved in references [4,5], whose method only known the manhole covers stay in the monitoring range of RFID reader, but did not obtain the result of the covers lies on the manhole. May be, the sensor and RFID combined to monitor the manhole covers state is a good research direction.…”