Dynamic Object Localization Based on Radio Frequency Identification and Laser Information

Recent researches show great interests in localizing dynamic objects through cost-effective technologies. Laser or visual-based approaches have to solve the singularity and occlusion problem from the environment. Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) is used as a preferred technology to address these issues, due to the unique identification and the communication without line of sight. In this paper, an innovative method is proposed to localize precisely a dynamic object equipped with an RFID tag by fusing laser information RFID information. A particle filter is used to fuse RFID signal strength, phase information, and laser ranging data. Particularly, a pre-trained signal strength-based model is used to incorporate the signal strength information. Then, the laser ranging data is divided into different clusters and the velocities of these clusters are compared with the RFID phase velocity. Matching results of both velocities are used to confine the locations of the particles during the update stage of the particle filtering. The proposed approach is verified by several experiments on a SCITOS service robot and results show that the proposed approach provides better localization accuracy when compared with laser-based approach and the signal strength-based approach.