An RFID-Based Robot Navigation System with a Customized RFID Tag Architecture

A major component of a mobile robot system is the ability to navigate accurately in unknown environments with little or no human intervention. In this paper, we present a modular and cost-effective navigation technique incorporating signals from RFID tags, an RFID reader, and a fuzzy logic controller (FLC). The RFID tags are placed at 3-dimensional positions in the robot's workspace in such a way that the lines linking their projection points on the ground define "free-ways" along which the robot is desired to navigate. The RFID reader is mounted on the mobile robot to communicate with the RFID tags to determine the robot's position. The FLC is then applied to guide the robot along a pre-defined trajectory in an unknown working environment. For this purpose, we introduce two minor changes to the RFID tag architecture while keeping that of the RFID reader unchanged. A simplistic circuit and a primitive microcontroller are added to the RFID tag to compute the signal's power received by the tag and encode it within the tag ID, respectively. This way, virtually any commercially available RFID reader can be used without the need for any special customization. The performance of the proposed navigation scheme is evaluated through several numerical simulations.