Application of radio frequency identification devices to support navigation of autonomous mobile robots

Autonomous mobile robots are expected to be a solution for a vast of applications in service and industry applications. However, a great and still unsolved problem for most environments and applications is the robust and cheap positioning, i.e. the determination of the robot's current position. A navigation system is presented, that is based on the use of radio frequency identification (RFID) as artificial landmark system. In combination with the presented behavior based control architecture this system enables the robot to reach any reachable landmark in its environment through a topological robot positioning approach. A technique called re-classification (which depends on the special features and advantages of RFID systems) is presented that makes it possible to determine the robot's exact global position in presence of a landmark. Based on this accurate position (i.e. its coordinates) the robot can reach an arbitrary goal specified by coordinates even if it is not marked with a RFID landmark.