Object Directive Manipulation Through RFID

In highly informative, perception-rich environments that we call Omniscient Spaces, robots interact with physical objects which in turn afford robots the information showing how the objects should be manipulated. Object manipulation is commonly believed one of the most basic tasks in robot applications. However, no approaches including visual servoing seem satisfactory in unstructured environments such as our everyday life. Thus, in Omniscient Spaces, the features of the environments embed themselves in every entity, allowing robots to easily identify and manipulate unknown objects. To achieve this end, we propose a new paradigm of the interaction through Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). The aim of this paper is to learn about RFID and investigate how it works in object manipulation. Specifically, as an innovative trial for autonomous, real-time manipulation, a likely mobile robot equipped with an RFID system is developed. Details on the experiments are described together with some preliminary results.