Hybrid RFID system-based pedestrian localization: A case study

Localization systems using RFID - especially passive RFID - are coming increasingly under the spotlight. Passive RFID has a relatively small sensing range compared to other radio-frequency-based localization techniques. Therefore in practice the deployed tags may not cover the whole scene of interest. Additionally, in the area of pedestrian localization, the unpredictable movement of pedestrians makes a complete RFID tag coverage extremely difficult. This paper introduces a hybrid RFID localization system used for indoor pedestrians to overcome the coverage shortfall associated with passive RFID tags. Two extra sources are used to assist the RFID system: local INS sensors and ZigBee nodes. A particle filter serves as a fusion framework. A test scenario was built with 220 RFID tags and 8 ZigBee nodes deployed in a museum. Different algorithms were evaluated in this deployment. The results show that the hybrid approach produces robust localization even with a low number of tags.