Autonomous Navigation of RFID-Sensing Robots ---Information Ensuring for the Visually Impaired (2) ---

Abstract

The construction of information ensured environment for the visually impaired (say, in the college life) combining data carrier and network technologies includes the problem of obtaining and conveying environmental information. As the visually impaired have keen difficulties in sensing changes of surroundings, in order to assist them we usually need an interface (say, a guide dog) between people and the environment. We put RFID tags on surrounding objects so that we can treat them as landmarks of the environment. Then we can design autonomous robots to sense the changes of locations of objects and situations. In this paper we describe a general navigation algorithm of such robots based on distance information obtained, say, by super sonic sensors which are equipped on the robot. Our algorithm is designed on the so-called Distance Field Space Model (DFM), which can be considered as a natural description of objects and space on the basis of a fuzzy set theory. Though major part of this paper is devoted to the development of the navigation principle based on DFM, our RFID-sensing robots are not equipped with this algorithm yet.

Autonomous navigation of mobile agents using RFID-enabled space partitions

“…Ferret is a localization system based on passive RFID that localizes static objects within an environment [12] and is not applicable to mobile agents. Other techniques used RFID tags to act as landmarks in the navigation process ( [3,6,11,16,17,10,20,26]). The RFID tags are sparsely deployed at known locations in the environment and help the agent to approximate its current location within computed environment model.…”

“…[6] and [11] navigate a mobile robot by combining the RFID landmarks and laser range finding techniques used for map matching. [16] integrates RFID tags serving as landmarks with ultrasound sensors for precise localization of robots. [17] is a localization system based on active RFID tags that are powered by a separate power source resulting in an increased read range.…”