skip to main content
10.1145/2639108.2639111acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesmobicomConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Tagoram: real-time tracking of mobile RFID tags to high precision using COTS devices

Published: 07 September 2014 Publication History

Abstract

In many applications, we have to identify an object and then locate the object to within high precision (centimeter- or millimeter-level). Legacy systems that can provide such accuracy are either expensive or suffering from performance degradation resulting from various impacts, e.g., occlusion for computer vision based approaches.
In this work, we present an RFID-based system, Tagoram, for object localization and tracking using COTS RFID tags and readers. Tracking mobile RFID tags in real time has been a daunting task, especially challenging for achieving high precision. Our system achieves these three goals by leveraging the phase value of the backscattered signal, provided by the COTS RFID readers, to estimate the location of the object. In Tagoram, we exploit the tag's mobility to build a virtual antenna array by using readings from a few physical antennas over a time window. To illustrate the basic idea of our system, we firstly focus on a simple scenario where the tag is moving along a fixed track known to the system. We propose Differential Augmented Hologram (DAH) which will facilitate the instant tracking of the mobile RFID tag to a high precision. We then devise a comprehensive solution to accurately recover the tag's moving trajectories and its locations, relaxing the assumption of knowing tag's track function in advance.
We have implemented the Tagoram system using COTS RFID tags and readers. The system has been tested extensively in the lab environment and used for more than a year in real airline applications. For lab environment, we can track the mobile tags in real time with a millimeter accuracy to a median of 5mm and 7.29mm using linear and circular track respectively. In our year- long large scale baggage sortation systems deployed in two airports, our results from real deployments show that Tagoram can achieve a centimeter-level accuracy to a median of 6.35cm in these real deployments.

References

[1]
J. Wang, F. Adib, R. Knepper, D. Katabi, and D. Rus, "Rf-compass: robot object manipulation using rfids," in Proc. of ACM MobiCom, 2013.
[2]
L. Ni, Y. Liu, Y. Lau, and A. Patil, "Landmarc: Indoor location sensing using active rfid," Wireless networks, 2004.
[3]
L. Shangguan, Z. Li, Z. Yang, M. Li, and Y. Liu, "Otrack: Order tracking for luggage in mobile rfid systems," in Proc. of IEEE INFOCOM, 2013.
[4]
J. D. Griffin and G. D. Durgin, "Complete link budgets for backscatter-radio and rfid systems," IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine, vol. 51, no. 2, pp. 11--25, 2009.
[5]
C. Hekimian-Williams, B. Grant, X. Liu, Z. Zhang, and P. Kumar, "Accurate localization of rfid tags using phase difference," in Proc. of IEEE RFID, 2010.
[6]
J. Wang and D. Katabi, "Dude, where's my card?: Rfid positioning that works with multipath and non-line of sight," in Proc. of ACM SIGCOMM, 2013.
[7]
S. Azzouzi, M. Cremer, U. Dettmar, R. Kronberger, and T. Knie, "New measurement results for the localization of uhf rfid transponders using an angle of arrival (aoa) approach," in Proc. of IEEE RFID, 2011.
[8]
P. V. Nikitin, R. Martinez, S. Ramamurthy, H. Leland, G. Spiess, and K. Rao, "Phase based spatial identification of uhf rfid tags," in Proc. of IEEE RFID, 2010.
[9]
T. Liu, L. Yang, Q. Lin, Y. Guo, and Y. Liu, "Anchor-free backscatter positioning for rfid tags with high accuracy," in Proc. of IEEE INFOCOM, 2014.
[10]
S. Sarkka, V. V. Viikari, M. Huusko, and K. Jaakkola, "Phase-based uhf rfid tracking with nonlinear kalman filtering and smoothing," IEEE Sensors Journal, vol. 12, no. 5, pp. 904--910, 2012.
[11]
ImpinJ, "Speedway revolution reader application note: Low level user data support," in Speedway Revolution Reader Application Note, 2010.
[12]
"Impinj, Inc," http://www.impinj.com/.
[13]
P. Zhang, J. Gummeson, and D. Ganesan, "Blink: A high throughput link layer for backscatter communication," in Proc. of ACM MobiSys, 2012.
[14]
L. Yang, J. Han, Y. Qi, C. Wang, T. Gu, and Y. Liu, "Season: Shelving interference and joint identification in large-scale rfid systems," in Proc. of IEEE INFOCOM, 2011.
[15]
"Dematic," http://www.dematic.com/linear-sorters.
[16]
"Alien," http://www.alientechnology.com/tags.
[17]
"Yeon," http://www.yeon.com.tw/.
[18]
EPCglobal, "Low level reader protocol (llrp)," 2010.
[19]
G. Li, D. Arnitz, R. Ebelt, U. Muehlmann, K. Witrisal, and M. Vossiek, "Bandwidth dependence of cw ranging to uhf rfid tags in severe multipath environments," in Proc. of IEEE RFID.
[20]
R. Miesen, F. Kirsch, and M. Vossiek, "Holographic localization of passive uhf rfid transponders," in Proc. of IEEE RFID, 2011.
[21]
A. Parr, R. Miesen, and M. Vossiek, "Inverse sar approach for localization of moving rfid tags," in Proc. of IEEE RFID, 2013.
[22]
W. Zhu, J. Cao, Y. Xu, L. Yang, and J. Kong, "Fault-tolerant rfid reader localization based on passive rfid tags," in Proc. of IEEE INFOCOM, 2012.
[23]
Y. Liu, L. Chen, J. Pei, Q. Chen, and Y. Zhao, "Mining frequent trajectory patterns for activity monitoring using radio frequency tag arrays," in Proc. of IEEE PerCom, 2007.
[24]
Y. Guo, L. Yang, B. Li, T. Liu, and Y. Liu, "Rollcaller: User-friendly indoor navigation system using human-item spatial relation," 2014.
[25]
V. Liu, A. Parks, V. Talla, S. Gollakota, D. Wetherall, and J. R. Smith, "Ambient backscatter: Wireless communication out of thin air," in Proc. of ACM SIGCOMM, 2013.
[26]
Y. Zheng and M. Li, "P-mti: Physical-layer missing tag identification via compressive sensing," in Proc. of IEEE INFOCOM, 2013.
[27]
L. Yang, Y. Qi, J. Fang, and et al., "Frogeye: Perception of the slightest tag motion," in Proc. of IEEE INFOCOM, 2014.

Cited By

View all
  • (2025)Enable Practical Long-Range Multi-Target Backscatter SensingIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2024.348013724:3(1437-1452)Online publication date: Mar-2025
  • (2025)Precise Coil Alignment for Dynamic Wireless Charging of Electric Vehicles with RFID SensingIEEE Wireless Communications10.1109/MWC.004.230059332:1(182-189)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2025
  • (2025)RF-TMS-CNNam: Non-Destructive Passive Liquid Concentration Detection Using RFID SystemsIEEE Sensors Journal10.1109/JSEN.2024.351043125:4(6486-6501)Online publication date: 15-Feb-2025
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Tagoram: real-time tracking of mobile RFID tags to high precision using COTS devices

      Recommendations

      Comments

      Information & Contributors

      Information

      Published In

      cover image ACM Conferences
      MobiCom '14: Proceedings of the 20th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking
      September 2014
      650 pages
      ISBN:9781450327831
      DOI:10.1145/2639108
      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: 07 September 2014

      Permissions

      Request permissions for this article.

      Check for updates

      Author Tags

      1. dah
      2. localization
      3. rfid
      4. tagoram
      5. tracking

      Qualifiers

      • Research-article

      Funding Sources

      Conference

      MobiCom'14
      Sponsor:

      Acceptance Rates

      MobiCom '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 36 of 220 submissions, 16%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 440 of 2,972 submissions, 15%

      Contributors

      Other Metrics

      Bibliometrics & Citations

      Bibliometrics

      Article Metrics

      • Downloads (Last 12 months)284
      • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)25
      Reflects downloads up to 18 Feb 2025

      Other Metrics

      Citations

      Cited By

      View all
      • (2025)Enable Practical Long-Range Multi-Target Backscatter SensingIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2024.348013724:3(1437-1452)Online publication date: Mar-2025
      • (2025)Precise Coil Alignment for Dynamic Wireless Charging of Electric Vehicles with RFID SensingIEEE Wireless Communications10.1109/MWC.004.230059332:1(182-189)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2025
      • (2025)RF-TMS-CNNam: Non-Destructive Passive Liquid Concentration Detection Using RFID SystemsIEEE Sensors Journal10.1109/JSEN.2024.351043125:4(6486-6501)Online publication date: 15-Feb-2025
      • (2025)Review on Systems Combining Computer Vision and Radio Frequency IdentificationIEEE Internet of Things Journal10.1109/JIOT.2024.348475512:2(1291-1319)Online publication date: 15-Jan-2025
      • (2024)Tag-Array-Based UHF Passive RFID Tag Attitude Identification of Tracking MethodsSensors10.3390/s2419630524:19(6305)Online publication date: 29-Sep-2024
      • (2024)Review on Security Range Perception Methods and Path-Planning Techniques for Substation Mobile RobotsEnergies10.3390/en1716410617:16(4106)Online publication date: 18-Aug-2024
      • (2024)RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) Localization and ApplicationApplied Sciences10.3390/app1413593214:13(5932)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
      • (2024)A Self-Enhancement Solution for Standard RFIDs: Software-based Cross-protocol Communication and LocalizationProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36997778:4(1-22)Online publication date: 21-Nov-2024
      • (2024)Stabilizing Dynamic Backscatter for Swift and Accurate Object TrackingACM Transactions on Sensor Networks10.1145/368747920:5(1-18)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2024
      • (2024)LiTEfoot: Ultra-low-power Localization using Ambient Cellular SignalsProceedings of the 22nd ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems10.1145/3666025.3699356(535-548)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2024
      • Show More Cited By

      View Options

      Login options

      View options

      PDF

      View or Download as a PDF file.

      PDF

      eReader

      View online with eReader.

      eReader

      EPUB

      View this article in ePub.

      ePub

      Figures

      Tables

      Media

      Share

      Share

      Share this Publication link

      Share on social media