A Multi-Sensing-Range Method for Position Estimation of Passive RFID Tags

Recently, the RFID tag system is paid attention to as an identification source. Each RFID tag is attached to some object. With the unique ID of RFID tag, a user identifies the object provided with the RFID tag, and derives appropriate information about the object. One of the important applications of RFID technology is the position estimation of RFID tags. It can be very useful to acquire the location information concerning the RFID tags. It can be applied to navigation systems and positional detection systems for robots etc. In this paper, we propose a new position estimation method of RFID tags by using a probabilistic approach. In this method, mobile objects (person and robot, etc) with RFID readers estimate the positions of RFID tags with plural communication ranges. We show the effectiveness of the proposed method by computer simulations.