14th EAI International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services

Research Article

TagController: A Universal Wireless and Battery-free Remote Controller using Passive RFID Tags

  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.4108/eai.7-11-2017.2273532,
        author={Dong Li and Feng Ding and Qian Zhang and Run Zhao and Jinshi Zhang and Dong Wang},
        title={TagController: A Universal Wireless and Battery-free Remote Controller using Passive RFID Tags},
        proceedings={14th EAI International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services},
        publisher={ACM},
        proceedings_a={MOBIQUITOUS},
        year={2018},
        month={4},
        keywords={battery-free remote controller action recognition cots rfid},
        doi={10.4108/eai.7-11-2017.2273532}
    }
    
  • Dong Li
    Feng Ding
    Qian Zhang
    Run Zhao
    Jinshi Zhang
    Dong Wang
    Year: 2018
    TagController: A Universal Wireless and Battery-free Remote Controller using Passive RFID Tags
    MOBIQUITOUS
    ACM
    DOI: 10.4108/eai.7-11-2017.2273532
Dong Li1,*, Feng Ding1, Qian Zhang1, Run Zhao1, Jinshi Zhang1, Dong Wang1
  • 1: Shanghai Jiao Tong University
*Contact email: dong.l@sjtu.edu.cn

Abstract

Innovative Human Machine Interface (HMI) technologies are fundamentally reshaping the way people live, entertain and work. Passive RFID tags, benefiting from its wireless, inexpensive and battery-free sensing ability, are gradually being applied in new-style interaction interfaces, ranging from virtual touch screen to 3D mouse. Inspired by these glittering interfaces, this paper presents TagController, a universal wireless and battery-free remote controller with two types of interactive actions: press and motion. The key insight behind is that fine-grained phase information extracted from RF signals is capable of perceiving various actions when people operate the battery-free remote controller. TagController can recognize 10 actions without any training or prestored profiles by executing a sequence of functional components, i.e. preprocessor, action detector and action recognizer. We have implemented TagController with Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) RFID devices and conducted substantial experiments in different scenarios. The results demonstrate that TagController can achieve an average recognition accuracy of 95.8% and 94.3% in the scenarios of one and two remote controllers, respectively, which promises its feasibility and robustness.