RFID-based autonomous mobile car

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) system is looked upon as one of the top ten important technologies in the 20^th century. Industrial automation application is one of the key issues in developing RFID. Therefore, this paper designs and implements a RFID-based autonomous mobile car for more extensively application of RFID systems. The microcontroller of Microchip PIC18F4550 is used to control the autonomous mobile car and to communicate with RFID reader. By storing the moving control commands such as turn right, turn left, speed up and speed down etc. into the RFID tags beforehand and sticking the tags on the tracks, the autonomous mobile car can then read the moving control commands from the tags and accomplish the proper actions. Due to the convenience and non-contact characteristic of RFID systems, the proposed mobile car has great potential to be used for industrial automation, goods transportation, data transmission, and unmanned medical nursing etc. in the future. Experimental results demonstrate the validity of the proposed mobile car.