A Probabilistic Approach for Mobile Robot Localization under RFID Tag Infrastructures

RFID Tag 기반 이동 로봇의 위치 인식을 위한 확률적 접근

SALM(Simultaneous localization and mapping) and AI(Artificial intelligence) have been active research areas in robotics for two decades. In particular, localization is one of the most important tasks in mobile robot research. Until now expensive sensors such as a laser sensor have been used for mobile robot localization. Currently, the proliferation of RFID technology is advancing rapidly, while RFID reader devices, antennas and tags are becoming increasingly smaller and cheaper. So, in this paper, the smart floor using passive RFID tags is proposed and, passive RFID tags are mainly used for identifying location of the mobile robot in the smart floor. We discuss a number of challenges related to this approach, such as tag distribution (density and structure), typing and clustering. In the smart floor using RFID tags, the localization error results from the sensing area of the RFID reader, because the reader just knows whether the tag is in the sensing range of the sensor and, until now, there is no study to estimate the heading of mobile robot using RFID tags. So, in this paper, two algorithms are suggested to. The Markov localization method is used to reduce the location(X,Y) error and the Kalman Filter method is used to estimate the heading($\theta$) of mobile robot. The algorithms which are based on Markov localization require high computing power, so we suggest fast Markov localization algorithm. Finally we applied these algorithms our personal robot CMR-P3. And we show the possibility of our probability approach using the cheap sensors such as odometers and RFID tags for mobile robot localization in the smart floor