MOBILE ROBOT NAVIGATION USING DIRECTION-SENSITIVE RFID READER

Suruz Miah and Wail Gueaieb

Keywords

Mobile robots, robot sensing systems, motion planning, intelligent control, direction of arrival estimation, antenna technology

Abstract

Most mobile robot localization techniques that depend on reference Radio Frequency (RF) stations are based on approximating the line-of-sight (LOS) distance between these stations and the robot by processing the strength of the RF signal propagating between the beacons and the robot. To date, mapping the strength of this signal to its corresponding distance remains a very challenging task to undertake, especially in reverberant environments. The manuscript outlines a novel nonholonomic mobile robot navigation system using a bearing-sensitive Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) reader which is specifically designed to operate in indoor reverberant environments. This design does not depend on an accurate mathematical model to map the RF’s Received Signal Strength (RSS) to an LOS distance. The proposed navigation system is evaluated through a series of computer simulations where a commercial electromagnetic simulation software (FEKO) is adopted to realistically assess the reverberations effect on the developed architecture. It has been shown that the robot successfully converges to its destinations under various magnitudes of reverberations.

Important Links:

Go Back