Robust Spinning Sensing with Dual-RFID-Tags in Noisy Settings

Abstract

Conventional spinning inspection systems, equipped with separated sensors (e.g., accelerometer, laser, etc.) and communication modules, are either very expensive and/or suffering from occlusion and narrow field of view. The recently proposed RFID-based sensing solution draws much attention due to its intriguing features, such as being cost-effective, applicable to occluded objects and auto-identification, etc. However, this solution only works in quiet settings where the reader and spinning object remain absolutely stationary, as their shaking would ruin the periodicity and sparsity of the spinning signal, making it impossible to be recovered. This work introduces Tagtwins, a robust spinning sensing system that can work in noisy settings. It addresses the challenge by attaching dual RFID tags on the spinning surface and developing a new formulation of spinning signal that is shaking-resilient, even if the shaking involves unknown trajectories. Our main contribution lies in two newly developed techniques, relative spinning signal and dual compressive reading. We analytically demonstrate that our solution can work in various settings. We have implemented Tagtwins with COTS RFID devices and evaluated it extensively. Experimental results show that Tagtwins can inspect the rotation frequency with high accuracy and robustness.