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

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.