Mobile drone localization in indoor environment based on passive RFID

Abstract

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is an information exchange technology based on RF communication. It provides solution to track and localize mobile objects in the indoor environment. Localization of mobile objects in an indoor environment garnered a significant attention due to the variety of applications needing higher degree of localization accuracy. RSSbased localization techniques are the major tools for tracking applications due to their simplicity. In this paper, a trilateration method for indoor localization is proposed. This method provides a solution for the drone tracking problem by collecting the RSS values between RFID tagged drone and reader, and estimate its location. The localization method is implemented in MATLAB by multiple readers; 4 RFID readers and 8 RFID readers. The performance of the localization method is also compared with other RFID localization previously reported in the literature. The simulation results in the case of 8 RFID readers demonstrate more accurate results than 4 RFID readers by minimizing the localization error from 0.84606 to 0.40079m. The results also indicate an improved localization performance of tracking a tagged drone in indoor environment by 42.8% when 8RFID readers are placed in the localization area.