Self-aligning roly-poly RFID tag

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is a mature technology that allows contactless data readout via a wireless communication link. While numerous passive RFID tags are available on the market, accurate alignment between tags and readers is required in a vast majority of cases to mitigate polarization mismatches. We show that enhancing electromagnetic designs with additional mechanical degrees of freedom allows bypassing fundamental limitations and approach ideal performances. Here, we demonstrate a new miniature tag, accessible from any direction and immune to rotations in space. Our tag is made of a high permittivity ceramic resonator, inductively coupled to a metal ring, which contains an RFID chip. The structure is placed inside a spherical plastic holder. In this architecture, the ceramic resonator serves several functions. First, it allows reducing the device footprint without significant bandwidth degradation. Second, it acts as a bob, aligning the electromagnetic structure parallel to the ground, regardless of its initial orientation in space. The bob is designed to slide inside the plastic holder. This roly-poly effect relaxes the constraint on a mutual tag-reader orientation, including the polarization mismatch, and provides next to perfect long-range operation. Being only 55 mm in diameter, our device can be interrogated from a 12 m distance, regardless of the tag’s orientation in space. Introducing mechanical degrees of freedom into electromagnetic designs allows obtaining new functionalities, contributing to applications where a mutual orientation between transvers is required.