Turning indoor tracking technology into smart solutions
Indoor asset tracking is a nascent market, forecast for a compound annual growth rate of over 14% to 2033. Many common factors influence this growth across business and technological markets.
Technology is making assets smarter, which increases productivity. This increased productivity comes at an operational expense that may only deliver a return if the asset’s utilization is high. The increased cost and operational importance of assets make tracking them more important.
There is also a trend toward mobility. Assets that represent capital expenditure on a spreadsheet are not just computers on desks. They include movable items like pallet trucks, machinery, tools and medical equipment.
At a human level, workers also need to be in the right place at the right time. Mobility demands new ways of managing all kinds of assets, their condition and location. While workers can report their location, assets must rely on technology. Vehicles equipped with GPS can report their location when outside, but GPS doesn’t work well in factories, hospitals, warehouses or anywhere with a roof. This presents a technical challenge.
BLE enables indoor tracking
The introduction of Direction Finding in release 5.1 of the Bluetooth Low Energy specification goes a long way toward solving this problem. BLE tags transmit a specific message, received by devices in a fixed, known position. The receivers must be designed for direction finding, which dictates using an array of antennas. At a hardware level, the performance of the antenna array is critical to overall accuracy.
Each antenna in the array receives the message at a slightly different time. This time difference is, in practice, a phase shift in the signal. Digital signal processing is used to realign the phase shifts. This realignment in software reveals the signal’s angle of arrival (AoA). The AoA represents the direction of the transmitter relative to the receiver. Using multiple receivers in different positions locates the tag in 3D space.
While the software to support direction finding is now standard in BLE 5.1 and above, achieving high accuracy relies on a total system solution. The information is encoded in the RF signal, which can be subject to distortion or noise in industrial environments. The tag’s design will also influence the quality and accuracy of direction finding.
Suppliers targeting this application are differentiated by how they implement the advanced signal processing technology needed. It must be integrated into the receiver, supported by an antenna array developed alongside the signal processing software.
IOSEA, a technology start-up and Avnet customer, has developed proprietary hardware and software that leverages BLE to deliver indoor location tracking to within 10cm. Its technology, SEAgnal®, which can run on many wireless microcontrollers that support BLE, focuses on scalability, efficiency and accuracy.
“Our proprietary technology comprises both hardware and software. IOSEA’s SEAgnal enabled locator technology, and RTLS Services form the basis of customized solutions designed around the customer’s specific needs,” explained Robert Go, chief marketing officer, IOSEA.
Indoor tracking has many applications
With the advent of smaller, battery-powered Bluetooth tags, any asset can be efficiently and cost-effectively tracked or located within any location. This information can be augmented within /IOTCONNECT dashboards to show environmental data, direction of travel, time in transit and more.
BLE locator calculates angle of arrival
Argus-One Locator is an example of IOSEA’s SEAgnal® enabled technology designed by IOSEA, it contains IOSEA’s switched 16-element antenna array, proprietary firmware and works with IOSEA’s real-time location system (RTLS) services for indoor direction finding. It’s a combination of both IOSEA’s unique hardware and software that mitigates the effects of multipath encountered indoors.
The locators are powered and connected using standard IEEE 802.3af Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) technology. This makes it simple to position the locators strategically in any environment without the cost of installing mains power, even in remote locations such as bay ceilings. Using PoE also removes the issue of poor Wi-Fi coverage for the backhaul to the cloud or local server.
The locator extracts the AoA data from Bluetooth tag transmissions and sends it over Ethernet to the cloud/local server hosting IOSEA’s RTLS software. As scalability and efficiency are central to IOSEA’s value proposition, the packet size has been optimized for low bandwidth. Packets can be just 144 bytes for location, with an optional 30 bytes for customer-specific data such as temperature, acceleration or inclination.
Smart solutions using /IOTCONNECT™
To make SEAgnal ready for its target markets, IOSEA turned to Avnet to leverage /IOTCONNECT , Avnet’s IoT software-as-a-service (SaaS), built on AWS.
Rather than trying to be a one-size-fits-all, /IOTCONNECT is modularized and configurable, providing all the features needed to build secure and scalable IoT platforms that perfectly fit the application.
Avnet achieves this through a comprehensive software architecture that includes an abstraction layer for AWS services. This abstraction layer makes it simpler for OEMs using /IOTCONNECT to leverage all the powerful features offered by AWS while creating a customized solution.
Asset tracking is rapidly changing the factory, warehouse and connected worker. Technology now makes it feasible to treat any item as an asset, including goods in process. These short-term assets represent revenue and their value to the manufacturer will increase as they progress through the business. Tracking goods as assets is just one way that smart factories and smart warehouses are redefining commerce.
Using Avnet’s preconfigured software accelerators, designed for v on AWS, IOSEA can now offer its customers an asset tracking and location solution optimized for their market.
The v software accelerators are modularized software libraries pre-configured to provide the features typically needed by any market. Avnet currently offers 15 software accelerators, including a version for smart asset tracking. Other software accelerators available now include smart warehouse management, the connected worker, industrial automation, smart facility monitoring, and more.
Asset tracking in the cloud
Using /IOTCONNECT , IOSEA’s customers can build asset-tracking solutions that can be deployed in any environment. Dashboards, an integral feature of /IOTCONNECT , can be configured to display information from the connected assets. This may include location, identification and type of asset. This could easily be augmented with a copy of the asset’s maintenance record or a list of authorized users, for example.
The /IOTCONNECT dashboard can also be configured to send notifications or alerts to supervisors. Ringfencing, a popular feature with connected assets, would notify a supervisor if/when an asset is taken outside its permitted area of operation.
As dashboards live in the cloud, they can be accessed anywhere at any time by any authorized user. This is one of the main benefits of a smart, connected solution.
Avnet and /IOTCONNECT deliver secure scalability
“Using /IOTCONNECT , IOSEA is now able to deliver a complete solution comprising hardware, software, and cloud,” said Go. “The addition of /IOTCONNECT to our product offering will help IOSEA scale up and service many more markets with customized solutions.”
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