The ability to track the real-time location and movement of items or people offers a range of useful applications in areas such as safety, security and the supply chain. Current location determination technologies have limitations that heavily restrict how and where these applications are implemented, including the cost, accuracy of the location calculation and the inherent properties of the system.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is an automatic identification technology which has seen increasingly prominent use over the last few decades. Advancements in the technology have allowed the location of transponders to be calculated while interfacing with the reader. This project is an investigation into the use of RFID Radar in positioning of mobile robots in the ISRC state of the art robot lab.

The main focus is to test tracking algorithms and their accuracy with regards the data reported by the RFID-Radar equipment. We would also like to examine how practical the deployment of an RFID location radar a particular area would be. We also want to test how much of a delay there is when calculating the location of a new tag that has entered the radar’s field of view, and if similar delays exit when updating tag data when the tag has moved.

Too much delays might mean that RFID-Radar is impractical for applications that require accurate real-time locations such as mobile robots. Help will also be provided to a degree by some of the existing robotics research associates.