Exploring commodity RFID for contactless sub-millimeter vibration sensing

Monitoring the vibration characteristics of a machine or structure provides valuable information of its health condition and this information can be used to detect problems in their incipient stage. Recently, researchers employ RFID signals for vibration sensing. However, they mainly focus on vibration frequency estimation and still face difficulties in accurately sensing the other important characteristic of vibration which is vibration amplitude in the scale of sub-millimeter. In this paper, we introduce TagSMM, a contactless RFID-based vibration sensing system which can measure vibration amplitude in sub-millimeter resolution. TagSMM employs the signal propagation theory to deeply understand how the signal phase varies with vibration and proposes a coupling-based method to amplify the vibration-induced phase change to achieve sub-millimeter level amplitude sensing for the first time. We design and implement TagSMM with commodity RFID hardware. Our experiments show that TagSMM can detect a 0.5 mm vibration, 10 times better than the state-of-the-arts. Our field studies show TagSMM can sense a drone's abnormal vibration and can also effectively detect a small 0.2 cm screw loose in a motor at a 100% accuracy.

[1]  Panlong Yang,et al.  RF-Ear: Contactless Multi-device Vibration Sensing and Identification Using COTS RFID , 2020, IEEE INFOCOM 2020 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications.

[2]  Yuan He,et al.  RED: RFID-based Eccentricity Detection for High-speed Rotating Machinery , 2018, IEEE INFOCOM 2018 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications.

[3]  Jie Xiong,et al.  mD-Track: Leveraging Multi-Dimensionality for Passive Indoor Wi-Fi Tracking , 2018, MobiCom.

[4]  Marco Gruteser,et al.  VibSense: Sensing Touches on Ubiquitous Surfaces through Vibration , 2017, 2017 14th Annual IEEE International Conference on Sensing, Communication, and Networking (SECON).

[5]  Romit Roy Choudhury,et al.  Listening through a Vibration Motor , 2016, MobiSys.

[6]  Daniel M. Dobkin,et al.  The RF in RFID: Passive UHF RFID in Practice , 2007 .

[7]  Yuan-Ping Luh,et al.  Reading Rate Improvement for UHF RFID Systems with Massive Tags by the Q Parameter , 2011, Wirel. Pers. Commun..

[8]  Yunhao Liu,et al.  Tagbeat: Sensing Mechanical Vibration Period With COTS RFID Systems , 2017, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.

[9]  Dan Wu,et al.  Human respiration detection with commodity wifi devices: do user location and body orientation matter? , 2016, UbiComp.

[10]  Karthikeyan Sundaresan,et al.  RIO: A Pervasive RFID-based Touch Gesture Interface , 2017, MobiCom.

[11]  Xinyu Zhang,et al.  Gyro in the air: tracking 3D orientation of batteryless internet-of-things , 2016, MobiCom.

[12]  Hon Tat Hui,et al.  Mutual Coupling in Antenna Arrays , 2010 .

[13]  Panlong Yang,et al.  Towards Physical-Layer Vibration Sensing with RFIDs , 2019, IEEE INFOCOM 2019 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications.

[14]  W. C. Miller,et al.  Improved approach to interpolation using the FFT , 1992 .

[15]  A. Hassan.  Dignosis of Pulley-Belt System Faults Using Vibration Analysis Technique , 2017 .

[16]  Zhengxiong Li,et al.  WaveEar: Exploring a mmWave-based Noise-resistant Speech Sensing for Voice-User Interface , 2019, MobiSys.

[17]  Lei Yang,et al.  Tagoram: real-time tracking of mobile RFID tags to high precision using COTS devices , 2014, MobiCom.

[18]  Romit Roy Choudhury,et al.  Ripple II: Faster Communication through Physical Vibration , 2016, NSDI.

[19]  Romit Roy Choudhury,et al.  Ripple: Communicating through Physical Vibration , 2015, NSDI.

[20]  Fadel Adib,et al.  Minding the Billions: Ultra-wideband Localization for Deployed RFID Tags , 2017, MobiCom.

[21]  Ju Wang,et al.  TagScan: Simultaneous Target Imaging and Material Identification with Commodity RFID Devices , 2017, MobiCom.

[22]  Frédo Durand,et al.  The visual microphone , 2014, ACM Trans. Graph..

[23]  Weibin Liu,et al.  Prediction of vibrations from underground trains on Beijing metro line 15 , 2010 .

[24]  John Z. Wu,et al.  Frequency-dependent effects of vibration on physiological systems: experiments with animals and other human surrogates. , 2012, Industrial health.

[25]  Kenju Otsuka,et al.  Real-time nanometer-vibration measurement with a self-mixing microchip solid-state laser. , 2002, Optics letters.

[26]  Terry T. Ye,et al.  Performance analysis of stacked RFID tags , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Conference on RFID.

[27]  Hae Young Noh,et al.  FootprintID , 2017, Proc. ACM Interact. Mob. Wearable Ubiquitous Technol..

[28]  Fadel Adib,et al.  Networking across boundaries: enabling wireless communication through the water-air interface , 2018, SIGCOMM.

[29]  Zimu Zhou,et al.  Enabling Gesture-based Interactions with Objects , 2017, MobiSys.

[30]  Xiang Li,et al.  Boosting fine-grained activity sensing by embracing wireless multipath effects , 2018, CoNEXT.

[31]  Lei Yang,et al.  Making sense of mechanical vibration period with sub-millisecond accuracy using backscatter signals , 2016, MobiCom.

[32]  Maciej Zawodniok,et al.  Preliminary study of mutual coupling effect on a passive RFID antenna array , 2013, 2013 IEEE International Instrumentation and Measurement Technology Conference (I2MTC).

[33]  Lu Wang,et al.  ViType: A Cost Efficient On-Body Typing System through Vibration , 2018, 2018 15th Annual IEEE International Conference on Sensing, Communication, and Networking (SECON).

[34]  M. S. Safizadeh,et al.  Using multi-sensor data fusion for vibration fault diagnosis of rolling element bearings by accelerometer and load cell , 2014, Inf. Fusion.

[35]  Lei Yang,et al.  Robust Spinning Sensing with Dual-RFID-Tags in Noisy Settings , 2018, IEEE INFOCOM 2018 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications.

[36]  Lei Ding,et al.  Vibration parameter estimation using FMCW radar , 2016, 2016 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP).

[37]  Gierad Laput,et al.  Vibrosight: Long-Range Vibrometry for Smart Environment Sensing , 2018, UIST.

[38]  Ramesh Raskar,et al.  Coded Strobing Photography: Compressive Sensing of High Speed Periodic Videos , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.