A Study on the RFID Tag-Floor Based Navigation

We are moving into the era of ubiquitous computing. Ubiquitous Sensor Network (USN) is a base of such computing paradigm, where recognizing the identification and the position of objects is important. For the object identification, RFID tags are commonly used. For the object positioning, use of sensors such as laser and ultrasonic scanners is popular. Recently, there have been a few attempts to apply RFID technology in robot localization by replacing the sensors with RFID readers to achieve simpler and unified USN settings. However, RFID does not provide enough sensing accuracy for some USN applications such as robot navigation, mainly because of its inaccuracy in distance measurements. In this paper, we describe our approach on achieving accurate navigation using RFID. We solely rely on RFID mechanism for the localization by providing coordinate information through RFID tag installed floors. With the accurate positional information stored in the RFID tag, we complement coordinate errors accumulated during the wheel based robot navigation. We especially focus on how to distribute RFID tags (tag pattern) and how many to place (tag granularity) on the RFID tag-floor. To determine efficient tag granularities and tag patterns, we developed a simulation program. We define the error in navigation and use it to compare the effectiveness of the navigation. We analyze the simulation results to determine the efficient granularities and tag arrangement patterns that can improve the effectiveness of RFID navigation in general.

RFID 태그플로어 방식의 내비게이션에 관한 연구