Localization and tracking with RFID technique for ROS-based mobile robot

Abstract

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology offers distinct advantages in target identification such as its robustness to environmental factors like darkness or occlusion. This dissertation presents a purely RFID-based robot tracking system that can be used to track a specific RFID-tagged target from a multi-tag scenario, with the RFID antennas mounted on a robot and the tagged target both moving. The proposed tracking system exploits both RSSI and phase of the RF signals, and have several features: 1) The tracking scheme works well when both the antennas and targets are moving. 2) The tracking process consists of two main stages namely the RF detection and the continuous tracking adaptive to the target's distance. 3) The mobile robot-based tracking system is operating autonomously starting from searching for a target to continuous tracking, going through a transition stage called phase correction which is achieved via phase unwrapping and solving hyperbolas intersection. Experiments demonstrate that the robot performs precise and agile tracking towards the aimed RFID-tagged target, with a mean error around centimeter level.