RFID based mobile robot for indoor navigation
- 1. RFID Based Tag Finding Mobile Robot for Indoor Navigation R.P. Surya Shankar, Assistant Professor, ICE dept., Kalasalingam University (KLU) .1 R.Arshat mohideen, K.Dhivakar, A. SivaKumar, final year students, ICE dept. KLU.2 Dr.K.Valarmathi, Professor, ECE dept, PSR Engg College, Sivakasi.3 ABSTRACT: For the past years, the development of robot technology had increased significantly due to industrial and military application, but intelligent robots for daily usage is yet to be implemented. To track or to detect humans or any other objects many methods are available and come in expansive product. This paper focuses on low cost goods carrying mobile robot. RFID (radio frequency identification) technology is used to navigate the goods carrying mobile robot in indoor environment. The RFID tag used here act as target for mobile robot in hallway. RFID reader has placed in the mobile robot to find the tag by transmitting radio waves. While moving on the hallway the obstacles if found can be avoided with the help of ultrasonic sensor. Finally the tag is used as the navigation for the robot, and also it enables as target for the robot. Mobile robot developed here is mainly used to carry goods. Keywords: Mobile Robot navigation, RFID, Ultrasonic sensor, Collision free path finding. 1. INTRODUCTION: RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) is a usual term for technologies that use radio waves to automatically identify persons or objects. RFID method consists of two major ingredients: digital tag and reader. According to the energized ways of tags, there are three classes of RFID, the active type, passive form and half - active form respectively. An active tag makes use of its interior vigor supply to provide vigor without the need of acquiring energy from RFID reader to initialize. Active tags can communicate with readers 10 meters to one hundred meters or extra away. Passive tags don't have any vigor source of their possess and ordinarily operate at a maximum distance of 3 meters or less. The utilization of RFID technology is novel and would enhance the existed automation process. A RFID based autonomous mobile goods carrying robot is designed and carried out in this paper. The ARDUINO based micro- controller is used to control the proposed system and to communicate with RFID reader. The autonomous mobile goods carrying robot can learn the moving control commands (such as forward, reverse, turn left or turn right) from the tags and implements the appropriate moves. 2. Related work: In existing works, they represents the indoor navigation of mobile robot using RFID technology as path generation and robot localization, to find the target is more complicate. They takes some time to generate map and robot is much expensive too. Due to its less cost and wireless identification characteristics, RFID has become an important technology in robotics, and has been used and applied for different applications. Previous studies have shown how to use RFID for localization, mapping,
- 2. navigation and object localization. They used more sensor model for the RFID reader, which computes easy to identify the tag detections. Using this model, the positions of passive RFID tags in a known environment were mapped with a high accurate. Regarding object tracking with RFID, demonstrated how to produce images of the spatial distribution of RSS for different tagged object environments. They measured the RSS value at each bearing by panning and tilting an RFID reader antenna. The fused ID-specific features Derived from an RSS image, a camera image, and a laser range finder scan were used to estimate the tagged objects’ 3D locations. For example, in Kinect sensor used mobile shopping cart, we need train the processor to recognize the user. By using the RFID technology which is very cheap and effective, and can be implement for real world application. Drawbacks of other methods: We need to give more training to the processor to detect each and every users Due to expensive they will not able to implement wildly. In the previous system, the accuracy of the robot navigation is less. 3. Experimental setup: Proposed system units: Power supply unit Controller unit Sensor unit Mechanical unit Software unit Motor driver unit Power supply unit: Heart of the mobile robot is power source. It utilizes a 6V, 4.5Ah DC rechargeable battery. It supplies energy to motors for movement, Arduino controller for making decision, sensors to provide environmental information. Controller unit: Brain of our proposed system is controller unit. Arduino Mega2560 is a microcontroller board which act as brain in our system. It has 54 digital I/O pins and 16 analog inputs. Clock speed is 16 MHz and flash memory is 256KB. It requires operating voltage at 5V. It can be easily programmed by using arduino software IDE. Sensor unit: The sensor unit consists of three ultrasonic sensors and the RFID-RC522 module. Ultrasonic sensor: Ultrasonic sensors, also called ultrasonic transducers, measure the distance to or the presence of a target object by sending a sound pulse, above therange of human hearing (ultrasonic), toward the target and then measuring the time it takes the sound (echo) to return. Knowing the speed of sound, the sensor determines the distance of the target and sets its outputs accordingly. Maximum range of obstacle detection is 400cm and minimum is 4cm. It requires 5V for its operations which is provided by the power supply unit. RFID-RC522: Radio frequency identification (RFID) is a technology that exchanges data through radio waves between a reader and a tag. The purpose of it is identification and tracking. In the near future, it is possible that RFID technology will appear in our daily lives just like the bar code technology did over the past
- 3. forty years. In this paper, we focus on small and low-cost passive RFID tags, based on the EPCGen2 standard, which is an international protocol for mostly passive RFID tags. Our proposed method utilizes RC522 Mechanical unit: Movement of robot is achieved by four wheels and each one is connected with the DC gear motor. It can make the robot to move forward or reverse direction and turn right or turn left directions. Robot platform has metal chassis to hold the battery and other units. Software unit: Arduino software IDE is used to upload the program codes to Arduino mega2560 microcontroller for desired application. Motor driver unit: The power from arduino controller is very small to operate the gear motors. Motor driving circuit such as L298 driver IC is used to provide proper current rating to the motors. 4. BLOCK DIAGRAM: WORKING PROCESS: In this proposed system three ultrasonic sensors are placed in front, right and in left. In this the front sensor is focused and while moving forward if it detects any obstacle, it will decide to move Right or Left depending on the low signal available in the Right or Left sensor, otherwise it defaultly moves right for particular time and then moves to left to reach the target. When the front sensor has low signal value Robot is moving forward, and If the Front sensor having high value, and side sensor having low value, one set of motor is moving forward and at the same time and another set of motor in reverse direction and by this way the robot is moving right or in left direction depending upon the sensor output. Simultaneously the RFID reader emits the radio waves to found the RFID tag to reach the target. These two devices are programmed in Arduino and controls the motor driver according to the signal comes. When RFID reader reads the tag value robot assumed that target reach and stop the movement. 5. METHODOLOGY: Signals from sensors were processed to get the required signal. RF and Echo signal features are extracted and the current position of the Robot is identified. While the robot is moving in its path way, any obstacle is detected, then robot will change the direction and update its new position till it reaches the target. i.e., RFID Tag. 6. Result: US distance in inches Distance in volt
- 4. 6 0.0 10 0.7 14 1.5 18 2.2 22 3.0 34 5.2 38 5.9 42 6.7 46 7.4 50 8.1 Table 1: ultrasonic sensor distance measurement, inches to voltage conversion by using formula Inches = (V * 5.4) + 6 RFID signal Strength Obstacle Detection (Ultrasonic sensor o/p) Robot Moving Direction Very weak / No signal No Forward Weak No Forward Weak Yes Turn right/left Medium Yes Slow down the speed of motor High Yes Stop Table2: Movement of robot due to RFID signal and ultrasonic output. When the Robot comes very near to target, the received signal strength (RSS) from the reader is too high. At this time, robot will temporally stop running. 7. Conclusion and Future work: 7.1 Conclusion In this paper, wepresent the RFID based tag finding mobile robot. Comparing to the other method RFID is minimum cost and the mobile robot can be easy to access and to use. 7.2 Future work: In future, work to be carried out on dynamic and unknown environment. Also with the help of optimization algorithm, work is carried out and best solution is to be obtained. The output may be extended to carry the patient in hospitals in case of emergency. Reference: 1 F. Lu and E. Milios, “Robot pose estimation in unknown environments by matching 2D range scans,” Journal ofIntelligent & RoboticSystems, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 249–275, 1997. 2 Khatib, O., Real-Time Obstacle Avoidance for Manipulators and MobileRobots,. 5, 1986. The International Journal of Robotics Research: p. 90-98. 3 RFID Journal - RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) Technology News & Features. Retrieved July 21, 2011,fromhttp://www.rfidjournal.com/ article/view/207 4 R. Liu, P. Vorst, A. Koch, and A. Zell, “Path following for indoor robots with RFID received signal strength,” in Proc. of the 19th Int. Conf. on Software, Telecommunications and Computer Networks (SoftCOM 2011), Croatia, September 2011. 5 D. Joho, C. Plagemann, and W. Burgard, “Modeling RFID signal strength and tag detection for localization and mapping,” in Proc. Of2009 IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2009), Kobe, Japan, May 2009, pp. 3160–3165.
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