Moving correction method of a mobile robot using passive RFID system based on obstacle prediction

Recently, indoor mobile robot navigation systems have been developed all over the world as the technology for assisting aged and physically handicapped people. Especially, the systems using passive RFID with features of low cost and simple composition have attracted attention over the years. However, in these systems, there are two serious problems. 1) A mobile robot performs the meandering moving. 2) A mobile robot is difficult to avoid obstacles. Hence, a moving correction method is required very much to solve the above two problems. In this paper, we propose a new moving correction method of a mobile robot using only passive RFID to improve the moving trajectory. This method reduces the serpentine moving of mobile robot and avoids obstacles by predicting obstacles and walls in front of the mobile robot. To show the effectiveness of the proposed system, we carry out the performance evolutions by computer simulations and experiments. As the results, we show that the proposed method can reduce the serpentine moving of the mobile robot compared with the conventional method and also can avoid obstacles.