DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF A RFID BASED MOBILE ROBOT

Abstract

The present manuscript proposes a novel mobile robot navigation technique using a customized RFID reader with two receiving antennas mounted on the robot and a number of standard RFID tags attached in the robot’s environment to define its path. The paper deals to design for skilled navigation in mobile robotics usually requires solving two problems pertaining to the knowledge of the position of the robot, and to a motion control strategy. 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 tasks ought to be solved in conjunction due to their interdependency. In here, we show that using the RF signal from the RFID tags as an analog feedback signals can be a promising strategy to navigate a mobile robot within an unknown or uncertain indoor environment. The ARM Microcontroller of Microchip LPC 2148 is used to control the autonomous mobile robot to communicate with RFID reader. By storing the moving control commands such as turn right, turn left, speed up and speed down etc. into the RFID tags beforehand and sticking the tags on the tracks, the autonomous mobile robot can then read the moving control commands from the tags and accomplish the proper actions. This method is computationally simpler and more cost effective than many of its counterparts in the state of the art. It is also modular and easy to implement since it is independent of the robot’s architecture and its workspace.