Autonomous Mobile Vehicle based on RFID Technology using an ARM7 Microcontroller

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) system is looked upon as one of the top ten important technologies in the 20th century. Industrial automation application is one of the key issues in developing RFID. Therefore, this paper designs and implements a RFID-based autonomous mobile vehicle for more extensively application of RFID systems. The microcontroller LPC2148 is used to control the autonomous mobile vehicle and to communicate with RFID reader. By storing the moving control commands such as turn right, turn left, speed up and speed down etc. into the RFID tags beforehand and sticking the tags on the tracks, the autonomous mobile vehicle can then read the moving control commands from the tags and accomplish the proper actions. Due to the convenience and non-contact characteristic of RFID systems, the proposed mobile vehicle has great potential to be used for industrial automation, goods transportation, data transmission, and unmanned medical nursing etc. in the future. Experimental results demonstrate the validity of the proposed mobile vehicle.