RFIDrone: Preliminary experiments and electromagnetic models

We introduce in a unitary way the paradigm of radiofrequency identification (RFID) merged with the technology of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) giving rise to RFIDrone devices. Such family comprises the READER-Drone, which is a suitable UAV integrated with an autonomous RFID reader to act as mobile scanner of the environment, and the TAG-Drone, a UAV only equipped with an RFID sensor tag that hence becomes a mobile and automatically re-positioned sensor. We shows some handy electromagnetic models to identify the upper-bound communication performance of RFIDrone in close proximity of a scattering surface and we resume the results of some preliminary open-air experimentation corroborating the theoretical analysis.