Robot movement strategies in the environment enriched with RFID tags

We investigate robot navigation in the environment with RFID tags during a series of simulated tests. A robot with bumper sensors, RFID reader, and odometry is given the task to drive around the environment and search for the specified number of tags. Our goal is to minimize the time needed to accomplish this task. Passive RFID tags were placed on the floor to irregular positions not forming a grid. Environments with different room configurations were considered. Three different strategies were investigated and the corresponding algorithms were evaluated on the simulator. One approach is minimalistic, using only random movement and bouncing back from walls and obstacles. The second strategy tries to remember the sequence of encountered tags and adjust its movements when it finds itself on the same path that was passed before, in order to diversify its routes. The last algorithm uses a predefined map of locations of tags. The robot has to navigate to the tags, provided that it is able to determine its own location and heading beforehand. The performance of different algorithms is compared based on the results of multiple test runs on the simulator.