skip to main content
10.1145/2500423.2500451acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesmobicomConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

RF-compass: robot object manipulation using RFIDs

Published: 30 September 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Modern robots have to interact with their environment, search for objects, and move them around. Yet, for a robot to pick up an object, it needs to identify the object's orientation and locate it to within centimeter-scale accuracy. Existing systems that provide such information are either very expensive (e.g., the VICON motion capture system valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars) and/or suffer from occlusion and narrow field of view (e.g., computer vision approaches).
This paper presents RF-Compass, an RFID-based system for robot navigation and object manipulation. RFIDs are low-cost and work in non-line-of-sight scenarios, allowing them to address the limitations of existing solutions. Given an RFID-tagged object, RF-Compass accurately navigates a robot equipped with RFIDs toward the object. Further, it locates the center of the object to within a few centimeters and identifies its orientation so that the robot may pick it up. RF-Compass's key innovation is an iterative algorithm formulated as a convex optimization problem. The algorithm uses the RFID signals to partition the space and keeps refining the partitions based on the robot's consecutive moves.We have implemented RF-Compass using USRP software radios and evaluated it with commercial RFIDs and a KUKA youBot robot. For the task of furniture assembly, RF-Compass can locate furniture parts to a median of 1.28 cm, and identify their orientation to a median of 3.3 degrees.

References

[1]
F. Adib and D. Katabi. See through walls with Wi-Fi! In ACM SIGCOMM, 2013.
[2]
Alien Technology Inc. ALN-9640 Squiggle Inlay. www.alientechnology.com.
[3]
L. Atzori, A. Iera, and G. Morabito. The internet of things: A survey. Computer Networks, 2010.
[4]
S. Azzouzi et al. New measurement results for the localization of UHF RFID transponders using an Angle of Arrival (AoA) approach. In IEEE RFID, 2011.
[5]
P. Bahl and V. Padmanabhan. RADAR: an in-building RF-based user location and tracking system . In IEEE INFOCOM, 2000.
[6]
J. Biswas and M. Veloso. Wifi localization and navigation for autonomous indoor mobile robots. In IEEE ICRA, 2010.
[7]
M. Bonert, L. Shu, and B. Benhabib. Motion planning for multi-robot assembly systems. International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing, 2000.
[8]
S. Boyd and L. Vandenberghe. Convex Optimization. Cambridge University Press, 2004.
[9]
M. Buettner and D. Wetherall. A software radio-based uhf rfid reader for phy/mac experimentation. IEEE RFID, 2011.
[10]
I. Bullock, R. Ma, and A. Dollar. A hand-centric classification of human and robot dexterous manipulation. IEEE Trans. on Haptics, 2013.
[11]
H. Chae and K. Han. Combination of RFID and vision for mobile robot localization. In IEEE ICSSINP, 2005.
[12]
G. Champleboux, S. Lavallee, R. Szeliski, and L. Brunie. From accurate range imaging sensor calibration to accurate model-based 3d object localization. In IEEE CVPR, 1992.
[13]
R. T. Chin and C. R. Dyer. Model-based recognition in robot vision. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 1986.
[14]
K. Chintalapudi, A. Padmanabha Iyer, and V. N. Padmanabhan. Indoor localization without the pain. In ACM MobiCom, 2010.
[15]
A. Collet, D. Berenson, S. S. Srinivasa, and D. Ferguson. Object recognition and full pose registration from a single image for robotic manipulation. In IEEE ICRA, 2009.
[16]
EPCglobal Inc. EPCglobal Class 1 Generation 2.
[17]
J. Fitch. Synthetic aperture radar. 1988.
[18]
Frost & Sullivan. Global RFID healthcare and pharmaceutical market. Industry Report, 2011.
[19]
Frost & Sullivan. Global RFID market. Industry Report, 2011.
[20]
M. Grant, S. Boyd, and Y. Ye. CVX: Matlab software for disciplined convex programming. http://cvxr.com/cvx.
[21]
W. E. L. Grimson and D. Huttenlocher. On the verification of hypothesized matches in model-based recognition. Computer Vision - ECCV, 1990.
[22]
D. Hahnel, W. Burgard, D. Fox, K. Fishkin, and M. Philipose. Mapping and localization with RFID technology. In IEEE ICRA, 2004.
[23]
S. Han, H. Lim, and J. Lee. An efficient localization scheme for a differential-driving mobile robot based on RFID system. IEEE Trans. Industrial Electronics, 2007.
[24]
Ikea lack table.smallwww.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/20011413.
[25]
E. Inc. Universal software radio peripheral. http://ettus.com.
[26]
S. Jorg, J. Langwald, J. Stelter, G. Hirzinger, and C. Natale. Flexible robot-assembly using a multi-sensory approach. In IEEE ICRA, 2000.
[27]
K. Joshi, S. Hong, and S. Katti. Pinpoint: Localizing interfering radios. In Usenix NSDI, 2013.
[28]
K. Khoshelham and S. O. Elberink. Accuracy and resolution of kinect depth data for indoor mapping applications. Sensors, 2012.
[29]
M. Kim and N. Y. Chong. Rfid-based mobile robot guidance to a stationary target. Mechatronics, 2007.
[30]
M. Kim and N. Y. Chong. Direction sensing RFID reader for mobile robot navigation. IEEE Trans. Automation Science and Engineering, 2009.
[31]
R. A. Knepper, T. Layton, J. Romanishin, and D. Rus. Ikeabot: An autonomous multi-robot coordinated furniture assembly system. In IEEE ICRA, 2013.
[32]
KUKA, youBot specification sheet.small youbot-store.com/downloads/ProductFlyer_KUKA_youBot_2pages.pdf.
[33]
Laird Technologies. Crushcraft S9028PCRW RFID antenna.
[34]
M. T. Mason. Creation myths: The beginnings of robotics research. IEEE Robotics Automation Magazine, 2012.
[35]
N. Michael, D. Mellinger, Q. Lindsey, and V. Kumar. The GRASP multiple micro-UAV testbed. IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine, 2010.
[36]
L. M. Ni et al. Landmarc: indoor location sensing using active rfid. Wirel. Netw., 2004.
[37]
P. Nikitin et al. Phase based spatial identification of uhf rfid tags. In IEEE RFID, 2010.
[38]
S. Nirjon and J. Stankovic. Kinsight: Localizing and tracking household objects using depth-camera sensors. In IEEE DCOSS, 2012.
[39]
S. Park and S. Hashimoto. Autonomous mobile robot navigation using passive RFID in indoor environment. IEEE Trans. Industrial Electronics, 2009.
[40]
M. Quigley, B. Gerkey, K. Conley, J. Faust, T. Foote, J. Leibs, E. Berger, R. Wheeler, and A. Ng. ROS: an open-source robot operating system. In IEEE ICRA Workshop on Open Source Robotics, 2009.
[41]
A. Rai, K. K. Chintalapudi, V. N. Padmanabhan, and R. Sen. Zee: zero-effort crowdsourcing for indoor localization. In ACM Mobicom, 2012.
[42]
Rethink robotics, Baxter specification sheet.small www.rethinkrobotics.com/files/8513/4792/6562/ProductBrochure_WebDownload.pdf.
[43]
J. Rifkin and E. Kruger. The end of work. 1996.
[44]
S. Schneegans, P. Vorst, and A. Zell. Using RFID snapshots for mobile robot self-localization. In ECMR, 2007.
[45]
A. Smith et al. Tracking Moving Devices with the Cricket Location System. In ACM MobiSys, 2004.
[46]
ThingMagic. Why Use RFID. www.thingmagic.com/.
[47]
VICON T-Series.small www.vicon.com/products/documents/Tseries.pdf.
[48]
J. Wang, H. Hassanieh, D. Katabi, and P. Indyk. Efficient and Reliable Low-Power Backscatter Networks. In ACM SIGCOMM, 2012.
[49]
J. Wang and D. Katabi. Dude, Where's my card? RFID Positioning That Works with Multipath and Non-Line of Sight. In ACM SIGCOMM, 2013.
[50]
J. Xiong and K. Jamieson. Arraytrack: A fine-grained indoor location system. In Usenix NSDI, 2013.
[51]
Y. Ye. Improved complexity results on solving real-number linear feasibility problems. Math. Program., 2006.
[52]
A. Yilmaz, O. Javed, and M. Shah. Object tracking: A survey. ACM Comput. Surv., 2006.
[53]
T. Zimmerman. Assessing the capabilities of RFID technologies. Gartner, 2009.

Cited By

View all

Index Terms

  1. RF-compass: robot object manipulation using RFIDs

      Recommendations

      Comments

      Information & Contributors

      Information

      Published In

      cover image ACM Conferences
      MobiCom '13: Proceedings of the 19th annual international conference on Mobile computing & networking
      September 2013
      504 pages
      ISBN:9781450319997
      DOI:10.1145/2500423
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

      Sponsors

      Publisher

      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 30 September 2013

      Permissions

      Request permissions for this article.

      Check for updates

      Author Tags

      1. RF localization
      2. RFIDs
      3. optimization
      4. robot mobile manipulation

      Qualifiers

      • Research-article

      Conference

      MobiCom'13
      Sponsor:

      Acceptance Rates

      MobiCom '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 28 of 207 submissions, 14%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 440 of 2,972 submissions, 15%

      Contributors

      Other Metrics

      Bibliometrics & Citations

      Bibliometrics

      Article Metrics

      • Downloads (Last 12 months)68
      • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)8
      Reflects downloads up to 07 Nov 2024

      Other Metrics

      Citations

      Cited By

      View all

      View Options

      Get Access

      Login options

      View options

      PDF

      View or Download as a PDF file.

      PDF

      eReader

      View online with eReader.

      eReader

      Media

      Figures

      Other

      Tables

      Share

      Share

      Share this Publication link

      Share on social media