The RFID tag system has received attention as an identification source. Each RFID tag is attached to some object. With the unique ID of the RFID tag, a user identifies the object provided with the RFID tag, and derives appropriate information about the object. One of important applications of the RFID technology is the position estimation of RFID tags. It can be very useful to acquire the location information concerning the RFID tags. It can be applied to navigation systems and positional detection systems for robots etc. In this paper, we propose a new position estimation method of RFID tags by using a probabilistic approach. In this method, mobile objects (person and robot, etc.) with RFID readers estimate the positions of RFID tags with multiple communication ranges. We show the effectiveness of the proposed method by computer simulations.

RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology is expected to be used as a localization tool. By the localization of RFID tags, a mobile robot equipped with an RFID reader can recognize the surrounding environment. In this paper, we propose a novel effective scheme called the communication range recognition (CRR) scheme for localizing RFID tags. In this scheme, an RFID reader determines the boundaries of the communication range when it is appropriately positioned by the robot. We evaluate the estimated position accuracy through numerous experiments. We show that the moving distance of the RFID reader in the proposed scheme is lower than that in conventional schemes.