Improved Mapping of RFID Tags by Fusion with Spatial Structure.

Abstract

This paper shows how to exploit knowledge about the spatial structure of an environment in order to obtain more accurate position estimates of passive RFID tags. Such labels are increasingly used as electronic product codes and are originally aimed at identifying goods. Estimating the positions of labeled products, however, is difficult because passive tags only reveal their presence and neither bearings nor distances to them. Previous related work showed that tag detection rates yield decent tag position estimates. Our method combines these solely RFIDbased methods with structural information. Indoor experiments with a mobile robot show increased accuracy as compared to mapping purely based on RFID measurements. Index Terms — Radio frequency identification (RFID); mobile robot; mapping; spatial structure I.