RFID localization for the visually impaired

For a visually impaired person landmarks play central role in his environment recognition. We set landmarks in the environment by RFIDs. We want to identify, trace and localizing them. As visually impairedness badly interfere with the detection of changes in the environment, we target localization of active RFID tags which are deployed in the room and subject to spontaneous move. We analyze experimental data of RSSI (received signal strength intensity) values received by the coupled twin antennas, showing that localization of target is in principle tractable on the data. Our approach for the localization problem is: 1. place several anchoring (fixed) RFIDs, 2. for the estimation of a possible location of movable RFIDs we use clustering by SOM, 3. we navigate robots iterating the estimation algorithm until we reach the desired object (RFID).