Although not young, ultra-wideband (UWB) is considered the new ‘location technology’ kid on the block and keeps growing at a healthy pace. Its precision-accurate capabilities are what sets it apart from other location services, and it’s a key enabler to exciting new use cases.
Satellites led the way with location technology
In the late 1990s and early 2000, global positioning systems (GPS) found their way into the mainstream. GPS was a huge advance in location technology and gave way to a new level of convenience that changed our lives in many ways. It allowed users to electronically locate the nearest fuel station, track fitness, map out travel plans, and find their way home. For businesses, the benefits go way beyond convenience: it is a matter of efficiency or even a matter of building sustainable business models. Without GPS, how would companies like Amazon, FedEx and UPS efficiently navigate deliveries to your doorstep?
Navigation moves indoors
Ten years later, we saw another breakthrough that brought navigation inside, aptly called indoor navigation or positioning (think Google Maps for malls, airports, and other large buildings). Indoor positioning is, in many ways, an inside version of the satellite-navigation apps we rely on for outdoor navigation, but with an added twist: it can also be used to help locate people and things. Much like GPS, indoor navigation uses positioning systems made up of sensors and communication technologies that include Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), Zigbee and Thread enabled devices to locate objects in indoor environments.
Fast forward to today and the rise of micro location-based systems is now being seen. People and businesses want to be able to locate and find anything in real time, whatever its size. Use these location-based systems to find misplaced car keys, or to find a favourite brand of coffee in store. Maybe a particular tool is needed from a storage bin in a factory, or a site manager is trying to deal with an emergency and needs to make sure everyone’s exited the building. Indoor positioning at the micro level can help in all these situations because it can not only locate items but also provide guidance to where they are located.
To offer enough accuracy, reliability and real-time capability, the underlying technology needs to be designed for precise location. This is where UWB technology is changing the game by delivering highly valuable location information across many different applications.
Developing an effective technology for indoor positioning at the micro-level requires several things. To begin with, location readings need to be very precise with accuracy down to as small an area as possible. The technology must be secure because the location often needs to be kept private. It also needs to be reliable, even in harsh environments, and easily scalable too, so it can address the thousands of people and assets in large venues. Other requirements include low power and affordability so it can be embedded in everything from high-end, complex devices like smartphones to low-end, simple devices like asset tags. The technology also must have latency low enough that it can track movement in real-time.
When designing the first indoor location systems, engineers used the technologies that were available to them which were generally Wi-Fi and BLE. While these technologies are great for data communication which is what they were invented for, neither of them was designed for real-time location services (RTLS), and therefore, do not meet all micro-based indoor positioning requirements.
Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and other narrowband radio systems can only reach an accuracy of several metres and their reliability doesn’t meet the 99,9% that’s required to build safe and trusted systems. Thousands of devices cannot all report their position simultaneously due to collisions and interference, and they struggle when used in the context of real-time location services.
Hence the reason why engineers from the IEEE, in the mid-2000s, started to specify a different kind of wireless technology specifically designed for accurate location that would check all the boxes. This technology was named Ultra-wideband (UWB) and has the potential to change the way in which all kinds of everyday tasks are performed.
UWB today
UWB is based on the IEEE standard 802.15.4a/z, which has been optimised for micro-location and secure communication. UWB can pinpoint people and things to within just a few centimetres, making it 100 times more accurate than the current implementations of BLE and Wi-Fi. UWB is ideal for RTLS for the following reasons:
• UWB is reliable because it has high immunity to various types of interference, including multipath, which is when a wave from a transmitter travelling to a receiver by two or more paths causes interference.
• UWB offers very low latency. Update rates of up to 1000 times per second and readings that are as much as 50 times faster than satellite navigation enable real-time location and tracking.
• UWB is implemented using mainstream CMOS technology, making it both affordable and optimised for low power.
• In addition to its location capabilities, UWB offers high data-rate and energy-efficient
data communication of up to 27 Mbps currently.
• UWB leverages distance-bounding techniques defined by the IEEE to provide a level of security that makes it an extremely secure format.
UWB is already bringing value to products and services in more than 40 verticals covering the consumer, automotive, industrial, and commercial market segments. It also enables secure, hands-free access to cars, front doors, homes and offices thanks to its secure distance bounding capability.
With the recent adoption in smartphones, UWB is now on the path to becoming the next ubiquitous wireless connectivity in our everyday lives. Having UWB in smartphones is an important first step towards mass adoption. But another key ingredient is to guarantee the interoperability between all those devices. The fast-growing consortium FiRa (www.firaconsortium.org), which already regroups more than 50 companies from the semiconductor, mobile, infrastructure and consumer space, is working actively on the definition of protocols that will guarantee such interoperability. This will make it possible for developers to use UWB in all kinds of new
ways such as indoor mapping and navigation, smart home applications, vehicle access and control, augmented reality, as well as mobile payments. Ultimately, the future of indoor location is only limited by the developer’s imagination.
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