RFID Base Path Tracking of Industrial Mobile Robots Localization for Indoor Environment

Abstract: Recently, academia and industry have focused on the creation of new systems for mapping and exploration of unknown and known spaces. Such networks comprise of sensor nodes and relay nodes carried by robots for information sensing and communication, and are able to perform accurate and real time inspection, especially in adverse environments. A practical dynamic Path Tracking (PT) scheme for industrial robots is presented. The robot localizes itself by means of a Kalman based algorithm that fuses robot odometry with the information coming from the phase of the signals of few reference RFID tags deployed along the path. Sensor node localization is critical in such networks because localization results can be used not only for locating and pinpointing leaks, but also for manoeuvring mobile sensor node's in a channel of complex configuration. The developed PT scheme can be seamlessly integrated with the industrial robot controller and improve the robot’s accuracy without retrofitting with high-end encoder. Keywords: Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), path tracking, sensor node and relay node