Obstacle-Avoidance Through RFID Near-Field Detectors for Robot-Based Localization and Sensing Systems

This paper introduces a mobile robot exploiting an RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) system to detect and locate RFID sensor tags using a Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) localization approach. The RFID system is also capable of retrieving environmental data from the commercial RFID sensor tags deployed in the environment, configured in passive mode. Additionally, an obstacle-avoidance system is implemented on the robot to prevent collisions with obstacles. The operational principle relies on RFID self-tuning tags attached to obstacles, serving as near-field coupling detectors. These tags identify potential hazards by recognizing when the reader antenna is in close proximity to obstacles. The system was validated with experiments and provided reliable temperature data, localization and high classification accuracy concerning the obstacle-avoidance.