A solution for monitoring operations in harsh environment: A RFID reader for small UAV

RIFD technologies are applied in a various number of environmental monitoring applications. Efficient energy management is one of the most important prerequisites for the realization of such systems and the power consumption of the RFID tag during radio transmissions must be kept low. The proposed system is composed by the RFID tags distributed on the territory and a reader installed on an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). The idea is to use the UAV to collect data from the RFID sensors scattered throughout the area by simply approaching them, flying above them, and downloading measured data. This solution can be adopted to implement a grid of independent RFID sensors covering a large area, or to query sensors located in dangerous scenarios for humans. RFID tags are equipped with measuring sensors and store locally the measured parameters; the reader is mounted on the UAV and through an appropriate communication protocols it identifies the tags, downloads the data and sends them to the Ground Control Station (GCS). At the GCS a technician can control the reader through a GUI console: it is possible to start the discovery, download the sensor data (manually or automatically) and clear the RFID tags memory. An ad-hoc mechanisms has also been implemented to join fast tag discovery procedure, fast data downloading and energy saving. The present paper describes the system, presents the testing methodology and analyses some achieved performances in a test scenario.