A Passive UHF RFID Tag Antenna for Road Marker Navigation Application

Location

Atrium

Session Format

Poster Presentation

Research Area Topic:

Engineering and Material Sciences - Electrical

Co-Presenters and Faculty Mentors or Advisors

Dr. Sungkyun Lim, Faculty Advisor

Abstract

During the past few decades Radio frequency identification (RFID) has been rapidly developed for tracking and identification such as inventory control or retail checking. Global positioning system (GPS) has been very widely used in modern vehicle navigation as well. GPS obtains longitude and latitude information from the satellites and indicates users’ specific location. However, there are some limits in GPS such as receiving no signal in the tunnels or getting high delay under some circumstances of the environment. These problems would be solved if the GPS with RFID technology are combined together. By placing RFID tag with the location information inside a road marker and installing the RFID reader on the car, the location information can be read from the road markers while driving on the road to compensate signal losses from GPS.

In this research, a tag antenna for low profile, RFID road marker navigation system is proposed. This tag antenna consists of an antenna and a chip could store and transmit information. Higgs 3 RFID chip, one of the common chips in commercial applications, with the impedance of 20 - j135 Ω. is used. In this application, conical radiation pattern from the tag antenna is required since the tag is placed on a side of the lane and it has to point out to the RFID reader on the car directly for the best signal reception. A quarter-wavelength monopole antenna is a good choice for generating the conical radiation pattern. However, the physical height of the quarter-wavelength monopole at 910 MHz is 82 mm, which is too tall to be installed in a road marker. Due to the limited spacing of the road marker, a special rectangular spiral top-loaded structure is implemented to reduce the antenna size and a conical radiation pattern is achieved for the road marker RFID navigation system.

The antenna matches with the conjugate of the Higg3 RFID chip with impedance of 20.1 + j101.5 Ω and it generates conical radiation pattern. The height of the antenna is 19 mm. The maximum directivity of the antenna is 4.17 dBi at theta of 29.5°. The radiation efficiency of the antenna is 85%. Therefore, the proposed RFID tag antenna is suitable for the road marker navigation application.

Keywords

RFID, Antenna, Navigation, Low profile

Presentation Type and Release Option

Presentation (Open Access)

Start Date

4-24-2015 10:45 AM

End Date

4-24-2015 12:00 PM

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Apr 24th, 10:45 AM Apr 24th, 12:00 PM

A Passive UHF RFID Tag Antenna for Road Marker Navigation Application

Atrium

During the past few decades Radio frequency identification (RFID) has been rapidly developed for tracking and identification such as inventory control or retail checking. Global positioning system (GPS) has been very widely used in modern vehicle navigation as well. GPS obtains longitude and latitude information from the satellites and indicates users’ specific location. However, there are some limits in GPS such as receiving no signal in the tunnels or getting high delay under some circumstances of the environment. These problems would be solved if the GPS with RFID technology are combined together. By placing RFID tag with the location information inside a road marker and installing the RFID reader on the car, the location information can be read from the road markers while driving on the road to compensate signal losses from GPS.

In this research, a tag antenna for low profile, RFID road marker navigation system is proposed. This tag antenna consists of an antenna and a chip could store and transmit information. Higgs 3 RFID chip, one of the common chips in commercial applications, with the impedance of 20 - j135 Ω. is used. In this application, conical radiation pattern from the tag antenna is required since the tag is placed on a side of the lane and it has to point out to the RFID reader on the car directly for the best signal reception. A quarter-wavelength monopole antenna is a good choice for generating the conical radiation pattern. However, the physical height of the quarter-wavelength monopole at 910 MHz is 82 mm, which is too tall to be installed in a road marker. Due to the limited spacing of the road marker, a special rectangular spiral top-loaded structure is implemented to reduce the antenna size and a conical radiation pattern is achieved for the road marker RFID navigation system.

The antenna matches with the conjugate of the Higg3 RFID chip with impedance of 20.1 + j101.5 Ω and it generates conical radiation pattern. The height of the antenna is 19 mm. The maximum directivity of the antenna is 4.17 dBi at theta of 29.5°. The radiation efficiency of the antenna is 85%. Therefore, the proposed RFID tag antenna is suitable for the road marker navigation application.