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The Design and Implementation of a Mobile RFID Tag Sorting Robot

Shangguan, L; Jamieson, K; (2016) The Design and Implementation of a Mobile RFID Tag Sorting Robot. In: Agarwal, S and Mascolo, C, (eds.) MobiSys '16: Proceedings of the 14th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services. Association for Computing Machinery (ACM): New York, NY, USA. Green open access

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Abstract

Libraries, manufacturing lines, and offices of the future all stand to benefit from knowing the exact spatial order of RFID-tagged books, components, and folders, respectively. To this end, radio- based localization has demonstrated the potential for high accuracy. Key enabling ideas include motion-based synthetic aperture radar, multipath detection, and the use of different frequencies (channels). But indoors in real-world situations, current systems often fall short of the mark, mainly because of the prevalence and strength of "multipath" reflections of the radio signal off nearby objects. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of MobiTagbot, an autonomous wheeled robot reader that conducts a roving survey of the above such areas to achieve an exact spatial order of RFID- tagged objects in very close (1–6 cm) spacings. Our approach leverages a serendipitous correlation between the changes in multipath reflections that occur with motion and the effect of changing the carrier frequency (channel) of the RFID query. By carefully observing the relationship between channel and phase, MobiTagbot detects if multipath is likely prevalent at a given robot reader location. If so, MobiTagbot excludes phase readings from that reader lo- cation, and generates a final location estimate using phase readings from other locations as the robot reader moves in space. Experimentally, we demonstrate that cutting-edge localization algorithms including Tagoram are not accurate enough to exactly order items in very close proximity, but MobiTagbot is, achieving nearly 100% ordering accuracy for items at low (3–6 cm) spacings and 86% accuracy for items at very low (1–3 cm) spacings.

Type: Proceedings paper
Title: The Design and Implementation of a Mobile RFID Tag Sorting Robot
Event: 14th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys '16)
Location: Singapore
Dates: 26 June 2016 - 30 May 2016
ISBN-13: 9781450342698
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1145/1235
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1235
Language: English
Additional information: Copyright © The Authors 2016.
Keywords: Order tracking, RFID, Localization, Multipath propagation
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1493115
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