Self-recognition of Vehicle Position Using UHF Passive RFID Tags

Abstract:
During the past 5 years, the UHF passive RFID technology has been widely adopted as a direct response to the needs of the supply chain management. When products affixed with UHF passive RFID tags (Tag(s)) are released, they travel from manufacturing plants to warehouses to retail shops. For supply chain management operators, it would be of great interest to be able to detect the current location of such products in real time. In real life applications, since most products are shipped on a Global Positioning System (GPS) tracked vehicles, their locations can be readily identified while they are en route. However, in order to identify the current locations of such products in an indoor environment, one needs to either manually record their exact locations or locate the indoor vehicles carrying such products.

Existing System:
Generally, to identify momentary locations of such vehicles, odometer is widely used. Odometer enables a vehicle to estimate the total distance traveled from a starting point. However, odometer is often inaccurate since estimation errors accumulate over time without corrections by external reference signals. Thus, there has been a growing interest in supplementing odometer to improve localization of mobile vehicles, particularly by using Tags.

Proposed System:
This paper proposes a method that enables self-recognition of a mobile vehicles current position by utilizing High Frequency passive radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. In particular, the proposed method makes use of RFID readers with identical emission configuration attached to a vehicle to identify a reference RFID tag. The RFID tags are patched in floor and the robot has the RFID reader connected to it. Whenever the RFID reader nears a tag, it reads the data from the tag. The position coordinate of the tag is previously stored in the microcontroller. According to the data received from tag, position coordinate is estimated. Thus, we can control the robot using the RF

communication with keypad interfaced to it. Estimated position is sent to the control section through Zigbee and displayed in the LCD.

Block Diagram:
Robot Section:

Power supply

RFID Tags

RFID Reader

AT89C51 Microcontroller

Decoder

RF Receiver

MAX232 Motor Driver Robot Mechanism

Motor Driver

Control Section:

Power supply

AT89C51 Microcontroller

LCD

RF Transmitter

Encoder

Hardware Requirements:
8051Microcontroller RF Transmitter & Receiver Zigbee Transceiver RFID Reader LCD & Keypad Robot Mechanism

Software Requirements:
Keil Compiler Embedded C

Advantages:
The robot can be controlled from remote areas without using GPS receiver. It can able to obtain the position of the mobile robot without any constraint from the environment.

Applications:
The proposed method can be used in real-industry environments such as complex storage warehouses where many different goods are dispersed throughout a wide area.