The real-time location system would need to track about 10 or 20 go-karts, and would need to be accurate enough to recognize when they drove over pictures painted on the track.
—Name withheld
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Most active RFID systems are accurate to within about 10 feet, so unless the pictures were large, most systems would not work. You might look into ultra-wideband (UWB) RFID, which can communicate over a wide range of frequencies, enabling the technology to eliminate the effects of waves traveling to a reader antenna via a variety of paths (waves can reflect off materials, making it difficult to determine a tag's distance from a reader). This technology can be accurate to within less than a foot, and might work for your needs.
Another option might be to put tags in the pavement and readers on the go-karts. That way, the readers would pick up the tags as they drove over the pictures. I don't know how fast the go-karts move, or whether there is sufficient time to energize the tag and receive a signal from it, but that might be worth exploring.
—Mark Roberti, Founder and Editor, RFID Journal
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