3D-OmniTrack: 3D Tracking with COTS RFID Systems

Abstract

RFID tracking has attracted significant interest from both academia and industry due to its low cost and ease of deployment. Previous works focus more on tracking in 2D space or separately consider tracking of the location and the orientation. They especially struggle in 3D situations due to the increase in the degree of freedom and the limited information conveyed by the RFID tags. In this paper, we propose 3D-OmniTrack, an approach that can accurately track the 3D location and orientation of an object. We introduce a polarization-sensitive phase model in an RFID system, which takes into consideration both the distance and the 3D posture of an object. Based on this model, we design an algorithm to accurately track the object in 3D space. We conduct real-world experiments and present results that show 3D-OmniTrack can achieve centimeter-level location accuracy with the average orientation error of 5°. 3D-OmniTrack has significant advantages in both the accuracy and the efficiency, compared with state-of-the-art approaches.