Pose Sensing With a Single RFID Tag

Determining an object’s spatial pose (including orientation and position) plays a fundamental role in a variety of applications, such as automatic assembly, indoor navigation, and robot driving. In this paper, we design a fine-grained pose sensing system called Tag-Compass that attaches a single tag to an object (whose size may be small) and identifies the tagged object’s pose by determining the spatial orientation and position of the tag. We exploit the polarization properties of the RF waves used in the communications between an RFID reader and the tag on the object. Polarization mismatch between the tag and the reader’s antenna affects the received signal strength at the reader. From the measured signal strength values, we are able to deduce the tag’s pose through a series of transformations and deviation minimization. We propose a system design for Tag-Compass and implement a prototype. We evaluate the performance of Tag-Compass through extensive experiments using the prototype. The experimental results show that Tag-Compass provides accurate estimate of object orientation with a median error of just 2.5° when the tag’s position is known and a median error of 3.8° when the tag’s position is unknown. In the latter case, Tag-Compass will provide an estimate of tag position as a byproduct of orientation sensing, with an accuracy comparable to the state of the art. It is practically appealing to find both the orientation and the position of an object using a single method, instead of having to deploy two different methods.