Obstacle recognition for a service mobile robot based on RFID with multi-antenna and stereo vision

In this paper, a novel method of obstacle recognition and localization for mobile robots using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology and stereo vision is proposed as it is inexpensive, flexible and easy to use in practical environments. As information about the obstacles or environment can be written in ID tags, the proposed method can detect the obstacles easily and quickly compared with other methods. By considering the probabilistic uncertainty of RFID, we introduce Bayes rule to calculate probability where the ID tag exists. But the accuracy of localization of obstacles is not enough for mobile robot navigation just using one antenna. In this paper, we discuss using multi-antennas to localize obstacle with ID tags. After localizing ID tag, the stereo camera starts to process the image of the region of interest where the obstacle exists. The proposed method does not need to process all the image and easily gets some information about obstacles such as size, and color, and thus decreases the processing computation. This paper introduces the architecture of the proposed method and some experimental results.