Autonomous mobile robot navigation using RFID technology

Abstract

Navigation techniques are of a paramount importance in the field of mobile robotics. They are employed in many contexts in indoor and outdoor environments such as delivering payloads in a dynamic environment, building safety, security, building measurement, research, and driving on highways. Skilled navigation in mobile robotics usually requires solving two problems, determining the position of the robot, and selecting a motion control strategy. Moreover, when no prior knowledge of the environment is available, the problem becomes even more difficult, as the robot has to build a map of its surroundings as it moves. These three tasks ought to be solved in conjunction, since they depend on each other. This dissertation explores the design of a cost-effective and modular navigation method for mobile robots. In particular, we will look at the process of navigating a mobile robot using the emerging RFID technology. A successful realization of this process has been addressed with two separate navigation modules. Each module presents a separate navigation algorithm for a mobile robot. In the first module, a customized RFID reader is mounted on the robot. The information provided by the reader will then be used for navigation. On the contrary, in the second module, custom-made RFID tags are attached at different locations in the navigation environment (on the ceiling of a building, posts, for instance). The position of the mobile robot is then determined based on the information provided by the tags in the robot's operating region. The angle between the robot's current direction and the target tag is used to provide actions to the actuators. In both modules, the algorithms take advantage of using analogue features of the RFID system instead of relying only on the binary tag number which conventional RFID-driven applications depend on.