Abstract
In this paper, we present an RFID based human and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Interaction system, termed RFHUI, to provide an intuitive and easy-to-operate method to navigate a UAV in an indoor environment. It relies on the passive Radio-Frequency IDentification (RFID) technology to precisely track the pose of a handheld controller, and then transfer the pose information to navigate the UAV. A prototype of the handheld controller is created by attaching three or more Ultra High Frequency (UHF) RFID tags to a board. A Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) RFID reader with multiple antennas is deployed to collect the observations of the tags. First, the precise positions of all the tags can be obtained by our proposed method, which leverages a Bayesian filter and Channel State Information (CSI) phase measurements collected from the RFID reader. Second, we introduce a Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) based approach to obtain a 6-DoF (Degrees of Freedom) pose of the controller from estimated positions of the tags. Furthermore, the pose of the controller can be precisely tracked in a real-time manner, while the user moves the controller. Finally, control commands will be generated from the controller's pose and sent to the UAV for navigation. The performance of the RFHUI is evaluated by several experiments. The results show that it provides precise poses with 0.045 m mean error in position and 2.5∘ mean error in orientation for the controller, and enables the controller to precisely and intuitively navigate the UAV in an indoor environment.