2D Phase-based RFID localization for on-site landslide monitoring

Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) shows great potential for earth-
sciences applications, notably in landslide surface monitoring at high spatio-
temporal resolution [1] with meteorological robustness [2]. Ten 865MHz
RFID tags were deployed on part of a landslide and continuously moni-
tored for 8 months by a station composed of 4 reader antennas. 2D rela-
tive localization was performed using a Phase-of-Arrival approach [3], and
compared with optical reference measurements. The centimeter-scale ac-
curacy of this technique was confirmed theoretically by developing a mea-
surement model that includes multipath interference and system sensitiv-
ity kernel. Although horizontal localization shows promising results, ver-
tical displacement monitoring presents intrinsic error sources that greatly
decrease accuracy in this direction. This study confirms that 2D landslide
displacement tracking is feasible at relatively low station and maintenance
cost (Charlety et al.,2021, submitted).

References

[1] M. Le Breton, L. Baillet, E. Larose, E. Rey, P. Benech, D. Jongmans, F. Guy-
oton, and M. Jaboyedoff, “Passive radio-frequency identification ranging, a
dense and weather-robust technique for landslide displacement monitoring,”
Engineering geology, vol. 250, pp. 1–10, 2019.
[2] M. Le Breton, L. Baillet, E. Larose, E. Rey, P. Benech, D. Jongmans, and
F. Guyoton, “Outdoor uhf rfid: Phase stabilization for real-world appli-
cations,” IEEE Journal of Radio Frequency Identification, vol. 1, no. 4,
pp. 279–290, 2017