RF-Protractor: Non-Contacting Angle Tracking via COTS RFID in Industrial IoT Environment

As a key component of most machines, the status of the rotation shaft is a crucial issue in the factories, which affects both the industrial safety and the product quality. Tracking the rotation angle can efficiently monitor the status of the rotation shaft, but traditional solutions either rely on the specialized sensors, suffering from intrusive transformation, or use the computer vision-based solutions, suffering from poor light conditions. In this paper, we present a non-contacting low-cost angle tracking solution, RF-Protractor, to track the rotation shaft based on the surrounding RFID tags. Particularly, instead of directly attaching the tags to the shaft, which may lead to serious miss reading problems due to metal interference, we deploy the tags beside the shaft and leverage the polarization effect of the reflection signal from the shaft for angle tracking. To improve the polarization effect, we exploit the linear polarization feature by using the linear shaft turntable or placing a light aluminum foil on the shaft turntable, which requires no transformation of the shaft. We firstly build a polarization model to quantify the relationship between the rotation angle and the reflection signal. To extract the accurate reflection signal, we then propose to combine the signals of multiple tags to cancel the reflection effect and then estimate the environment-related parameter to calibrate the model. Finally, we propose to leverage both the power trend and the IQ signal to estimate the rotation direction and the rotation angle. We have implemented a real system and the extensive experiments in the real environment confirm the effectiveness of RF-Protractor, which achieves an average error of about 3.1° in angle tracking.