From U-Tile to Indoor-Tracer: An Indoor Location Sensing Platform Based on Passive RFID

One key technique in Internet of Things(IoT) is localization, which has been an indispensable context for most of the applications in IoT. In this paper, we introduce an indoor location detecting platform based on the passive RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology. The major advantage of our platform is that it can be adopted to meet different detection granularity requirement based on the flexible RFID antenna design. Second, the only thing for a user to carry with is a tiny RFID tag on his/her shoes which is light weight and no charging power problems. Thirdly it will be shown that our design is easy to be augmented into normal artifacts in an unobtrusive way for the indoor environment. Two versions of the RFID-based location detection systems are introduced. One is called U-tile (Ubiquitous tile), in which passive RFID reader is embedded into the tiles. Another improved version is called Indoor-tracer, which adopts anti-collision RFID and more light weight comparing with the previous version U-tile so that it can embedded into various artifacts like bags and drawers. The performances of both two prototype systems were evaluated and the mutual-aware applications for remote family based on IoT were developed by using the platform.