Autonomous Mobile Robot Navigation Systems Using RFID and their Applications

摘要

Many existing methods for robust and stable mobile robot navigation employ sensors such as vision, sonar, or inertial sensors; however, these often have problems with reliability. A common, but sometimes overlooked, solution is the use of radio frequency identification (RFID). Using RFID, one can dynamically calculate the robot's pose from the information of RFID tags and navigate autonomously with precise localization, even without all of the aforementioned sensors. This chapter presents methods for estimating location and pose and explains how RFID can be used to navigate a mobile robot with not only regular patterns but also randomly distributed patterns of tags. In addition, it introduces a new concept, called "read time", which can reduce localization error in RFID-based navigation. The chapter also explains how the system can be extended to perform obstacle avoidance, and possible applications for RFID-based navigation systems. Controlled Vocabulary Terms radiofrequency identification; satellite navigation