BlueBot: asset tracking via robotic location crawling

From manufacturers, distributors, and retailers of consumer goods to government departments, enterprises of all kinds are gearing up to use RFID technology to increase the visibility of goods and assets within their supply chain and on their premises. However, RFID technology alone lacks the capability to track the location of items once they are moved within a facility. We present a prototype automatic location sensing system that combines RFID technology and off-the-shelf Wi-Fi based continuous positioning technology for tracking RFID-tagged assets. Our prototype system employs a robot, with an attached RFID reader, which periodically surveys the space, associating items it detects with its own location determined with the Wi-Fi positioning system. We propose four algorithms that combine the detected tag's reading with previous samples to refine its location. Our experiments have shown that our positioning algorithms can bring a two to three fold improvement over the positional accuracy limitations in both the RFID reader and the positioning technology.