A Probabilistic Approach for Mobile Robot Localization under RFID Tag Infrastructures

SLAM(Simultaneous localization and mapping) and AI(Artificial intelligence) have been active research areas in robotics for two decades. In particular, localization is one of the most important issues in mobile robot research. Until now expensive sensors like a laser sensor have been used for the mobile robot's localization. Currently, as the RFID reader devices like antennas and RFID tags become increasingly smaller and cheaper, the proliferation of RFID technology is advancing rapidly. So, in this paper, the smart floor using passive RFID tags is proposed and, passive RFID tags are mainly used to identify the mobile robot's location on the smart floor. We discuss a number of challenges related to this approach, such as RFID tag distribution (density and structure), typing and clustering. In the smart floor using RFID tags, because the reader just can senses whether a RFID tag is in its sensing area, the localization error occurs as much as the sensing area of the RFID reader. And, until now, there is no study to estimate the pose of mobile robot using RFID tags. So, in this paper, two algorithms are suggested to. We use the Markov localization algorithm to reduce the location(X,Y) error and the Kalman Filter algorithm to estimate the pose(q) of a mobile robot. We applied these algorithms in our experiment with our personal robot CMR-P3. And we show the possibility of our probability approach using the cheap sensors like odometers and RFID tags for the mobile robot's localization on the smart floor.