Synthetic aperture RFID handheld with tag location capability

Patent metadata

Field	Value
Publication number	US-9459343-B2
Application number	US-201514870150-A
Country	US
Kind code	B2
Filing date	Sep 30, 2015
Priority date	Mar 22, 2012
Publication date	Oct 4, 2016
Grant date	Oct 4, 2016

Abstract

A system for determining a bearing or location of a radio frequency identification (RFID) tag using a handheld RFID reader is described. In one embodiment, the reader is equipped with an accelerometer. A user moves the reader while the reader receives the tag's signal and determines the tag signal's phase at multiple locations. The locations of the reader antenna can be reconstructed using the accelerometer data. By using the phase determined at multiple locations in conjunction with the location of the reader antenna, the reader can determine the bearing of the tag. For an RFID reader not equipped with an accelerometer, the sign and ratio of the rate of change in the phase of a tag's signal to the distance traveled by the reader antenna can be used to determine the location of the tag relative to the reader.

First claim

What is claimed is:

1. A radio frequency identification (RFID) reader comprising:
a location or movement determination component comprising a sensor, the location or movement determination component configured to measure location or acceleration of the RFID reader; and
an RFID radio comprising a first antenna that transmits a first radio frequency (RF) query;
wherein a first phase and a second phase for a tag signal sent by a tag is calculated in response to the first RF query…

Assignees

• Intermec Ip Corp

Inventors

• Nikitin Pavel
• Rao Kvs
• Brueckmann Rainer
• Leland Hunter
• Kelly Stephen

Classifications

• G01S13/74 Primary

  Physics · mapped topic

• G01S5/12

  Physics · mapped topic

• G01S5/06

  Physics · mapped topic

• G01S5/0284

  Physics · mapped topic

• G01S5/02585

  Physics · mapped topic