Robot-based UHF-RFID joint SAR localization and tag sensing

The sensing capabilities of Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) devices have steadily improved in recent years to the extent of enabling passive wireless sensing. Automatic and reliable monitoring of the environment can then be achieved by deploying passive RFID sensor tags in the area of interest that can measure multiple physical parameters. Mobile RFID systems assisted by robots may be a good candidate to perform localization and sensor data collection of these devices with improved automatizing. This paper presents a mobile robot-aided system for localizing and reading RFID sensor tags information. The robot motion allows exploiting the well-known SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) for accurate tag positioning. The system can operate with commercial hardware and it is demonstrated by means of experiments in a realistic scenario.