Dina Kuznetsova

A multi-purpose RFID reader supporting indoor navigation systems

In this paper we introduce an UHF-RFID reader system built to serve as a multi-purpose reader for UHF-RFID applications. The structure of the reader itself is highly flexible to be able to include several standards. The intended use of the reader, however, consists in the support of navigation systems for the indoor environment. Assuming that arbitrarily distributed RFID tags, containing their exact positions given in latitude, longitude and elevation, are read out by the reader, the system is able to achieve the tags positions. In that case, the reader is able to evaluate and forward the readout positions in order to notify a superior navigation system of the estimated position, obtained from the RFID tags. This will lead to a more robust navigation system being able to navigate even in a high-grade multipath environment. Anyway, this paper concentrates more on technical terms concerning the reader system, including signal and spectrum analysis.

Using RFID-capable cell phones for creating an extended navigation assistance

This paper offers an RFID-based indoor navigation application which utilizes cell phones with an RFID extension and distributed RFID tags fixed to interior equipment. This combination creates a special navigation environment which helps pedestrians to orient oneself in new respectively unknown environments. Therefore, each RFID tag contains information about the current position, location or an unknown environment. Thus, the current position can be determined, which is the basic for navigation. A further advantage of this application is the availability of additional graphical data stored on the RFID tags. This additional graphical data contains global information about the indoor environment and also local graphical information about the near environment of the RFID tag. This yields to an RFID-based navigation system, that not only shows the current position but also the near environment surrounding that specific location. Therefore, this systems grants navigation assistance by leading the user step-by-step or rather tag-by-tag to the final destination.

GIDS - A system for combining RFID-based site information and web-based data for virtually displaying the location on handheld devices

This paper describes an application that uses RFID information to display location-based coordinates on a map. An RFID transponder containing the coordinates of the transponders position as well as optional information, e.g. about the location, building, neighborhood, is read out by a specially developed RFID reader. The reader processes the information and forwards it to a handheld device, which is wireless connected to a database/intranet or the Internet. In a first step this handheld device is a Tablet PC running a software application, which processes the data received from the transponder and maps the transponders position on a graphical output. The graphical output is based on the Google Maps environment and implemented in a web browser plugin. For this purpose, the software application uses specific scripts (implemented in JavaScript), which generate standard and custom maps based on the Google Maps API.