Localization of Mobile Robot Based on Radio Frequency Identification Devices

Ubiquitous location based services, offer helpful services anytime and anywhere by using real-time location information of objects based on ubiquitous network. Particularly, autonomous mobile robots can be a solution for various applications related to ubiquitous location based services, e.g. in hospitals, for cleaning, at airports or railway stations. However, a meaningful and still unsolved problem for most applications is to develop a robust and cheap positioning system. A typical example of position measurements is dead reckoning that is well known for providing a good short-term accuracy, being inexpensive and allowing very high sampling rates. However, the measurement always has some accumulated errors because the fundamental idea of dead reckoning is the integration of incremental motion information over time. The other hand, a localization system using RFID offers absolute position of robots regardless of elapsed time. We construct an absolute positioning system based on RFID and investigate how localization technique can be enhanced by RFID through experiment to measure the location of a mobile robot. Tags are placed on the floor at 5cm intervals in the shape of square in an arbitrary space and the accuracy of position measurement is investigated . To reduce the error and the variation of error, a weighting function based on Gaussian function is used. Different weighting values are applied to position data of tags since weighting values follow Gaussian function.

RFID를 이용한 이동로봇의 위치인식기술