Real-Time RFID Indoor Positioning System Based on Kalman-Filter Drift Removal and Heron-Bilateration Location Estimation

Abstract

This paper proposes Kalman-filter drift removal (DR) and Heron-bilateration location estimation (LE) to significantly reduce the received signal strength index (RSSI) drift, localization error, computational complexity, and deployment cost of conventional radio frequency identification (RFID) indoor positioning systems without any sacrifice of localization granularity and accuracy. By means of only one portable RFID reader as the targeted device and only one pair of active RFID tags as the border-deployed landmarks, this paper develops a real-time portable RFID indoor positioning device and cost-effective scalable RFID indoor positioning infrastructure, based on Kalman-filter DR, Heron-bilateration LE, and four novel preprocessing/postprocessing techniques. Experimental results reveal that the proposed Kalman-filter DR method is faster and better to converge the distance measurement (DM) error than conventional probability/statistics in terms of various relative distances under certain RSSI drift effect condition, and the proposed Heron-bilateration LE method is also faster and better to converge the LE error than conventional proximity pattern matching and trilateration in terms of three or more landmarks under certain DM error condition. On the other hand, a portable RFID indoor positioning device is smoothly implemented on an Android smartphone platform attached with a portable Bluetooth-based RFID reader.