An efficient localization algorithm for mobile robots based on RFID system

This paper presents an efficient localization scheme for an indoor mobile robot using an RFID system. The mobile robot carries an RFID reader at the bottom of the chassis, which reads the RFID tags on the floor to localize the mobile robot. Each RFID tag stores its own absolute position which is used to calculate the position, orientation and velocity of the mobile robot. However, a localization system based on RFID technology suffers from the estimation error inevitably. In this paper, a scheme to reduce the estimation error is newly introduced. Also for more efficient localizations, the orientation-estimation algorithm is introduced using only one RFID reader attached at the robot. In order to reduce the position error generating within RFID reader recognition area, an error-compensation algorithm based on the relations of the localization error to the gap between the tags and the velocity of the robot, is proposed. The main ideas proposed in this paper are successfully demonstrated to raise the accuracy of the robot localization through experiments.