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This paper summarizes the adoption of new technologies in the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki, Greece. RFID technology has been adopted. RFID tags have been attached to the artifacts. This allows for several interactions, including tracking and automated registering of movements of exhibits, personnel and visitors inside the museum, location-dependent guided tours and more. Furthermore, a prototype RFID-enabled social robot has been designed and constructed. The robot includes several possibilities of interaction with the environment and the visitors, allowing for the development of different applications. In this context, the robot plays treasure-games with younger visitors, benefiting from oral, touch and RF interactions. It also joins conversations with the visitors around the exhibits, exploiting artificial intelligence, giving information on the exhibits., {"references":["CultureId – Project. Link: https://cultureid.web.auth.gr/ (accessed October 14, 2022).","Use of RFID in the Met Museum, New York. Link: https://www.rfidjournal.com/nycs-metropolitan-museum-of-art-adopts-rfid (accessed April 5, 2023).","National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art Adopts Active-Passive RFID Solution. Link: http://fareastsun.com/News/news-0004.html (accessed April 5, 2023).","RFID in the National Gallery of Singapore. Link: https://www.nationalgallery.sg/magazine/how-do-we-tag-and-track-artworks (accessed April 5, 2023).","Karimi, R., Nanopoulos, A., Schmidt-Thieme, L. (2012). RFID-Enhanced Museum for Interactive Experience. In: Grana, C., Cucchiara, R. (eds) Multimedia for Cultural Heritage. MM4CH 2011. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 247. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27978-2_17.","RFID Tags Enhance Museum Experiences and Back-End Support. Link: https://biztechmagazine.com/article/2019/10/rfid-tags-enhance-museum-experiences-and-back-end-support (accessed April 5, 2023).","Hellou, M., Lim, J., Gasteiger, N. et al. Technical Methods for Social Robots in Museum Settings: An Overview of the Literature. Int J of Soc Robotics 14, 1767–1786 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-022-00904-y.","Robot in the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum. Link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/a-day-in-the-life-of-pepper-the-robot/2018/10/15/5f589df2-c8af-11e8-9b1c-a90f1daae309_story.html (accessed April 5, 2023).","Let a Robot Be Your Museum Tour Guide. Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/14/arts/design/museums-experiment-with-robots-as-guides.html (accessed April 5, 2023).","Maria Dermenoudi, Dimitris Karolidis, Aggeliki Moneda, Vasiliki Drakaki, Antonis G. Dimitriou, \"The Use of RFID Technology for the Collection Management in the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki\", 6th International Conference on Smart and Sustainable Technologies, 08-11 September 2021, Split, Croatia.","Anastasios Tzitzis, Aristidis Raptopoulos Chatzistefanou, Spyros Megalou, Stavroula Siachalou, Traianos Yioultsis and Antonis G Dimitriou, \"Device-free Human Tracking Exploiting Phase Disturbances and Particle Filters\", 16th Annual International Conference on RFID, IEEE RFID 2022, 17 May- 19 May 2022, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA.","Spyros Megalou, Aristidis Raptopoulos Chatzistefanou, Anastasios Tzitzis, Traianos Yioultsis and Antonis G Dimitriou, \"Passive UHF-RFID Hyperbolic Positioning of Moving Tags by Exploiting Neural Networks\", in IEEE Journal of Radio Frequency Identification, doi: 10.1109/JRFID.2022.3158730.","Anastasios Tzitzis, Aggeliki Moneda, Traianos Yioultsis and Antonis G. Dimitriou, \"Phase-based Device-free Tracking exploiting a Cylindrical Human model and Kalman Smoothing,\" 2022 7th International Conference on Smart and Sustainable Technologies (SpliTech), June 2022, Split, Croatia.","Spyros Megalou, Aristidis Raptopoulos Chatzistefanou, Anastasios Tzitzis, Andreana Malama, Traianos Yioultsis, Antonis G. Dimitriou, \"Hyperbolic Positioning and Tracking of Moving UHF-RFID Tags by Exploiting Neural Networks\", 16th European Conference on Antennas and Propagation, 27 March- 01 April 2022, Madrid, Spain.","Robot – demo. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4HmPYuXliQ (accessed October 14, 2022).","Alexandros Filotheou, Anastasios Tzitzis, Emmanouil Tsardoulias, Antonis Dimitriou, Andreas Symeonidis, George Sergiadis, Loukas Petrou, \"Passive Global Localisation of Mobile Robot via 2D Fourier-Mellin Invariant Matching,\" Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems, vol. 104:26, January 2022, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-021-01535-7.","Alexandros Filotheou, Georgios D. Sergiadis, Antonis G. Dimitriou, \"FSM: Correspondenceless scan-matching of panoramic 2D range scans,\" IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2022), October 2022, Kyoto, Japan.","Anastasios Tzitzis, Andreana Malama, Vasiliki Drakaki, Aggelos Bletsas, Traianos Yioultsis and Antonis G. Dimitriou, \"Real-Time, Robot-Based, 3D Localization of RFID Tags, by Transforming Phase Measurements to a Linear Optimization Problem\", IEEE Journal of Radio Frequency Identification, doi: 10.1109/JRFID.2021.3103393.","Sofia Pliasa, Anna Maria Velentza, Antonis G. Dimitriou, Nikos Fachantidis, \"Interaction of a Social Robot with Visitors inside a Museum through RFID Technology\", 6th International Conference on Smart and Sustainable Technologies, 08-11 September 2021, Split, Croatia.","Aristidis Raptopoulos Chatzistefanou, Anastasios Tzitzis, Spyros Megalou, George Sergiadis and Antonis G. Dimitriou, \"Target Localization by Mobile Handheld UHF RFID Reader and IMU,\" in IEEE Journal of Radio Frequency Identification, doi: 10.1109/JRFID.2022.3147539.","Aristidis Raptopoulos Chatzistefanou, Spyros Megalou, Stavroula Siachalou, Vasiliki Drakaki, George D. Sergiadis, Antonis G. Dimitriou, \"Target Localization by Mobile Handheld UHF RFID Reader\", 16th European Conference on Antennas and Propagation, 27 March- 01 April 2022, Madrid, Spain.","Aristidis Raptopoulos Chatzistefanou, George Sergiadis, Antonis G. Dimitriou, \"Tag Localization by Handheld UHF RFID Reader with Optical and RFID Landmarks,\" in IEEE Journal of Radio Frequency Identification, doi: 10.1109/JRFID.2023.3238822.","Aristidis Raptopoulos Chatzistefanou and Antonis G. Dimitriou, \"Tag Localization by Handheld UHF RFID Reader and Optical Markers,\" 2022 IEEE International Conference on RFID Technology and Applications (RFID-TA) - IEEE RFID TA 2022, September 2022, Cagliari, Italy.","George Mylonopoulos, Aristidis Raptopoulos Chatzistefanou, Alexandros Filotheou, Anastasios Tzitzis, Stavroula Siachalou, Antonis G. Dimitriou, \"Localization, Tracking and Following a Moving Target by an RFID Equipped Robot,\" 2021 IEEE International Conference on RFID Technology and Applications (RFID-TA) - IEEE RFID-TA 2021, 6-8 October 2021, Delhi, India."]}

In this paper, we propose a prototype method for fast and accurate 3D localization of RFID-tagged items by a mobile robot. The robot performs Simultaneous Localization of its own pose and Mapping of the surrounding environment (SLAM). It is equipped with RFID readers and antennas placed at different heights, collecting phase-measurements by all tags. Thanks to the self-localization property of the robot, a synthetic aperture is created for each tag. In this paper, we have manipulated the set of phase-measurements, combined with the known poses of the robot to craft an overdetermined system of linear equations which pinpoints the location of the tag. The linearity of the system preserves that localization is achieved rapidly. The problem is solved for any arbitrary movement of the robot and extended in three dimensions. The proposed method is experimentally compared against the state-of-the-art in SAR-based RFID localization. It is the fastest and the most accurate, when the robot moves along straight-paths. Its accuracy slightly worsens, when the robot moves along non-straight paths, while preserving its exceptionally small running-time. It can be applied in real-time 3D localization problems, demonstrating mean 3D accuracy below 20 cm.

Summarization: This work offers a novel, backscatter radio-based, blind beamforming technique that assists the reception of signals in multipath conditions. The technique is based on simple, assistive backscattering tags, implemented without any means of signal amplification. These tags can blindly (i.e., without feedback) modify the phase of the associated wireless channels, leading to constructive addition of the multipath components (i.e., alignment). Such alignment events offer distributed beamforming gain. Analysis is performed and an expression for the probability of alignment is offered, along with an expression for the achievable gain, corroborated by simulations and experimental results. It is shown that increased number of assistive tags offers higher beamforming gain, at the expense of increased delay. The effectiveness of the proposed beamforming technique is highlighted with experiments and measurements on the radio frequency identification (RFID) Gen2 standard. Commercial RFIDs that initially could not be interrogated due to insufficient impinged power, were successfully interrogated hundreds of times/minute with the assistance of the beamforming tags. It was experimentally shown that the proposed beamforming tags can offer power gains in the range of 0.4 – 3.7 dB. While the technique was tested on commercial RFIDs, it is not limited to a specific communication standard. Presented on: IEEE Journal of Radio Frequency Identification