A Fast UHF RFID Localization Method Using Unwrapped Phase-Position Model

• Published in: IEEE transactions on automation science and engineering Vol. 16; no. 4; pp. 1698 - 1707
• Main Authors: Wu, Haibing, Tao, Bo, Gong, Zeyu, Yin, Zhouping, Ding, Han
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01-10-2019; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Accuracy; Algorithms; Automatic identification; Bar codes; Computational efficiency; Computing time; Intelligent warehouse; Localization; Localization method; Logistics management; Mobile antennas; mobile robot; Mobile robots; phase unwrapping; Radio frequency; Radio frequency identification; radio frequency identification (RFID) localization; Radiofrequency identification; RF signals; Robots; Tags; Test procedures; Thermal noise; UHF technology; Ultrahigh frequencies; ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) RFID; Warehouses
• ISSN: 1545-5955; 1558-3783
• DOI: 10.1109/TASE.2019.2895104

A novel ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) radio frequency identification (RFID) localization method is proposed in this paper, by which the location of a static passive tag can be easily obtained using a mobile RFID antenna. An unwrapped phase-position model with three parameters is built, and the location of the tag can be pinpointed through an ordinary nonlinear least-squares algorithm. The main advantage of this method is that it is cheap in computation cost compared with the existing grid-based methods. The experimental tests confirm that the proposed method can localize the RFID tags with a competitive computational efficiency and accuracy performance, i.e., millisecond-level computing time and centimeter-level location accuracy. The proposed UHF RFID localization method is well suited to the pervasive location-aware applications, searching RFID-tagged item in the intelligent warehouse by the mobile robot with an onboard RFID system, for example.