发布时间：2021-11-11
A team of researchers from Georgia Tech (Charles Kemp, Travis Deyle and Hai Nguyen) and Duke University (Matthew S. Reynolds) have developed several prototypes of personal robots. The challenge is how to make the machine perceive, manipulate, and understand the world around it so it can interact with humans and objects to perform specific tasks, like loading a dishwasher or delivering medicine.
Passive UHF RFID labels provide the interface through which a personal robot can interact to carry out its tasks. Passive Ultra-High Frequency (UHF) RFID tags are well matched to robots’ needs. Unlike low-frequency (LF) and high-frequency (HF) RFID tags, passive UHF RFID tags are readable from across a room, enabling a mobile robot to efficiently discover and locate them. Because they don’t have onboard batteries to wear out, their lifetime is virtually unlimited. And unlike bar codes and other visual tags, RFID tags are readable when they’re visually occluded.
For less than $0.25 per tag, users can apply self-adhesive UHF RFID tags throughout their home. EL-E, one of the prototypes built by the research team, uses ThingMagic M5e UHF RFID reader modules to form the core of the robot’s RFID sensors. The Mercury M5e is embedded in two antennas on the robot, one for reading tags up to approximately 6 meters and other for reading the same tags within 30 centimeters of the robot’s hand. The Georgia Tech research team partnered with Willow Garage, a California company that builds robots for research. Specifically, the team built the EL-E RFID application using Willow Garage’s PR2 robot as the “infrastructure.” The partnership was featured on CNN’s The Big I show.
