Ultra-wideband indoor positioning technology

It is well known that indoor positioning refers to the location of objects or people in an indoor environment. In recent years, as indoor positioning has improved in its accuracy, it has become an important foundation of the age of the Internet in terms of providing highly accurate locational information for the retail, manufacturing, medical, and robotic industries.

According to surveys by market&market, the global market for indoor positioning will grow at an annual compound growth rate of 42.0% over the next few years, with market size projected to increase from $710 million in 2017 to $40.9 billion in 2022. As a result, indoor positioning will usher in a period of rapid growth over the next few years.

The original site is temporarily inaccessible: hundreds of billion-class indoor positioning markets, and could UWB technology be at the top of the pyramid?

1. Global distribution of indoor positioning

In the indoor positioning market, North America accounts for 32% of the market share. Because of significant research and development and technological advances in indoor positioning technology, North America is expected to continue to lead the indoor positioning market.

The Asia-Pacific region has the lowest market share, at only 18%, but the vast majority of markets are in China, thanks entirely to China’s rapid economic growth in manufacturing and consumer industries in recent years. Looking at the market as a whole, locational services are driven by many factors, of which business-driven and government-driven are two key factors.

At the commercial level, giants and start-ups, both domestic and foreign, have made extensive attempts to promote indoor positioning techniques, and the industrial chain of indoor location services is emerging.

At the government level, the State Council, the Ministry of Science and Technology, and the Ministry of Industry and Communications have issued a number of policy recommendations to promote the development of indoor positioning systems. For example, the country’s 13th Five-Year Plan sets out guidelines for navigation and location services, including seamless indoor and outdoor navigation, multi-model co-location, multi-dimensional location information, location awareness, and unmanned map services.

The strong involvement of industry giants and government organizations in indoor positioning services will promote rapid user recognition of indoor positioning and accelerate the ecological maturity of indoor location services. As a result, applications of indoor positioning services in China, even in the Asia-Pacific region, will grow rapidly over the next few years.

2. The importance of indoor positioning

Indoor positioning can rapidly open markets globally and gain global recognition for four reasons:

• Indoor positioning is the basis for high-level data on physical networking and location.

Indoor positioning technology combines human beings and objects in the real world with the wealth of data and information in virtual space, allowing people and objects under the line to be searched, located and connected like online information, thus breaking the boundaries of the real world and the virtual world and connecting everything.

In addition, indoor positioning generates and accumulates a large amount of locational data. In 2017, China’s big data market reached 22.5 billion yuan, maintaining an average annual growth rate of more than 30 per cent during the “1355” period.

• Indoor positioning is widely used in the areas of consumer and business services.

Indoor positioning can provide services for consumers such as mall-driven shopping, parking reverse search vehicles, family protection, LBS friendships, and self-help guides in the exhibition hall.

• Indoor positioning provides consumers with the wisdom to live.

Underline consumption experiences are poor: merchants, large and intuitive amounts of information about commodities, car-inverting difficulties in parking, which can be addressed by indoor positioning, which can also be similar to online shopping experiences. In addition, indoor positioning can help to prevent the loss of older children; and to make it possible for intelligent homes and offices.

• Indoor positioning promotes business marketing and operational efficiency improvements.

Indoor positioning can help the retail industry achieve human flow monitoring statistics and individual analysis, improve service delivery to users through large location data insight into user consumption behaviour, gain higher commercial value; help medical, industrial, service, etc. to identify operational efficiency bottlenecks and track statistics; help businesses, mines, health institutions to monitor critical assets and building personnel, ensure the safety of property and personnel, and provide rapid human rescue in emergencies, etc.

3. Indoor positioning by industry

Indoor positioning is widely used in all industries.

The distribution of indoor positioning is 16 per cent in retail trade, 14 per cent in health care, 12 per cent in tourism, 12 per cent in logistics, 12 per cent in advertising, 11 per cent in public safety and 23 per cent in other industries. It follows that indoor positioning is universally applicable, that it is applied in a wide range of contexts, that it is widely applied and that it is not subject to restrictions of an industrial nature.

IV. UWB-positioned industries and market sizes

Indoor positioning is universally applicable to a wide range of positioning technologies. Common indoor positioning technologies include ultrasound technology, infrared positioning technology, bluetooth positioning technology, WiFi positioning technology, UWB (superbroadband) positioning technology, ZigBee positioning technology, radio frequency technology, inertial navigation technology, geomagnetic positioning technology, visual positioning, etc.

The need for precision varies from industry to industry, so the techniques used are not the same. Among them, the UWB’s positioning techniques are most commonly used in sectors such as smart manufacturing, intelligent construction, old age medicine, public safety, and logistics transport.

What is UWB (Ultra Wideband)?

The UWB concept dates back to 1960, but has been viewed as a base-band, non-carrier pulse technology, which can be used only for military radar systems. It was only in 1989 that the United States Department of Defense (DARPA) first used the term “superbroadband” and specified that any signal with an absolute bandwidth greater than 1.SGHz or a relative bandwidth greater than 25% at 20dB was referred to as a hyperbroadband signal.

In 2002, the FCC (United States Federal Communications Commission) amended the definition of UWB to refer to the UWB signal as the signal - 10dB with an absolute bandwidth greater than 0.5 GHz or a relative bandwidth greater than or equal to 20%.

On 22 February of the same year, the FCC allowed UWB technology to enter the civil domain, without the need to apply for it. Subsequently, with the rapid development of microelectronics, UWB technology has generated a new wave of research and applications at the international level and is considered to be a revolutionary technology for the next generation of wireless communications.

What is the difference between UWB systems and traditional narrowband systems?

Superbroadband systems, compared to traditional narrowband systems, have the advantage of high permeability, low utility, high multi-routing effectiveness, high safety, low complexity of the system, and the ability to provide precision positioning. Thus, UWB technologies can be applied to stationary or mobile objects, as well as to human positioning and navigation.

UWB market size:

Based on the application of UWB technology, it can be assumed that UWB positioning systems account for 30% - 40% of the market share of the indoor positioning market. Resource utilization and work flow optimization in manufacturing industries have led to growing demand for real-time positioning systems based on UWB technology, contributing to UWB advances in positioning accuracy and increasing market competitiveness.

UWB technology is expected to penetrate a wide range of indoor positioning systems applications in sectors such as smart manufacturing, smart construction, old-age medicine, public safety, logistics transport, and so forth, gradually becoming the mainstream technology for tracking and positioning services during 2018-2022. As the advantages of automated asset tracking and management are recognized, real-time positioning systems based on hyperbroadband technology and wireless sensor network markets will grow at a higher rate than the average rate of growth during 2018-2022.

V. What kind of industry does UWB position address?

Given the different scenarios for indoor positioning applications, we can divide positioning techniques into two categories: services for consumers and services for business clients. The UWB positioning system clearly belongs to the latter.

The UWB positioning system, which has a precision of up to 10 cm, allows for the accurate location of people in real time and integrates risk control, video connection, historical trajectory, personnel management, electronic fencing, behavioural surveillance, emergency response, etc., to help enterprises address the following occupational pain points:

• Remote monitoring

The UWB positioning system provides real-time updates of location information and accurate real-time location of persons or goods. It also allows for the visual tracking of persons or materials, keeping abreast of the situation on the ground in each region, facilitating real-time management and providing effective security for persons and materials.

• Risk management

High-risk industries, such as tunnels, chemical plants, mines, etc., are more likely to have safety accidents; UWB positioning systems can be effective in helping enterprises to manage risk. We can install electronic fences in dangerous or important areas, manage staff authority and prevent employees from entering dangerous areas; we can also conduct a variety of behavioural monitoring of people, including overtime, crowd monitoring, static monitoring, etc., all-round intelligence management, improving management quality, and reducing the incidence of safety accidents.

• Emergency response management

In the event of a security incident, a person can use a location terminal device that he or she wears to provide urgent help. Of course, managers can also call people, alert staff or issue evacuation orders, etc. They can also check the location of all persons through the location system and ensure that all personnel leave the hazardous area.

• Customer experience management

Clients are inevitable when travelling to the company. Clients are unaware of the company’s environment and are prone to straying into dangerous areas. The indoor positioning system provides real-time access to information about the arrival and exit of visitors, the time spent in a particular area, the trajectory of their activities, etc., and we can install electronic fences to prevent the private entry of clients into dangerous areas from causing accidents, and to refine, digitize, intelligent management of visitors and improve customer experience.

• Inventory material management

For example, it is very time-consuming to look for a car in a whole car warehouse. Enterprises can locate each vehicle and check its location through location tags, making it easier to search for a vehicle.

• Sales optimization

According to the information on the location of persons provided by the indoor positioning system, the company can optimize the distribution pattern and obtain higher economic returns.

6. Market opportunities for UWB positioning

• UWB positioning technology is mature and widely used

UWB’s positioning system is as precise as 10 cm, and has the advantage of being highly dynamic, high-capacity, and low-capacity. At present, a large number of UWB’s indoor positioning projects have been completed at home and abroad.

• The country attaches great importance to it and relevant governments strongly support

In recent years, a number of hazardous industries, such as chemical plants, tunnels, etc., have issued a safety management policy that obliges enterprises to strengthen their personnel orientation systems, such as the “six systems for coal mine safety and safety”, “Standards for integrated corridor transport”, “135 Judicial information development”, “Strategic two-door construction requirements for the chemical industry”, “Provisional regulations for a safety management system for road tunnel construction”, etc.

• The support links up and down the industrial chain are well developed, and the applications are on the verge of an explosion.

With the initial emergence of the commercial model of indoor positioning and the strong push of mainstream chip producers, location service providers, integrated manufacturers, etc. at various stages of the industrial chain, UWB indoor positioning is expected to spread rapidly in the area of public safety and the industry will be at the breaking point.

7. Industrial chain structure of UWB positioning

• Upstream chip and underlying technology

Given the late start of UWB’s location chip development and the fact that there are no large-scale domestic producers of UWB positioning chips, most of the UWB’s location chip comes from Decawave, a foreign-origin company. Decawave is one of the world’s largest UWB location chip producers, using countries like China, Ireland, France, Korea, the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, etc. Decawave chips have now been deployed on more than 5 million devices and are favoured by more than 2,500 businesses worldwide.

• Midstream location service provider

The location service provider is based on the UWB positioning chip and has developed the UWB positioning system in conjunction with its own positioning algorithm. The location service provider has developed a well-developed positioning system that includes real-time location displays, track tracking and playback, electronic fencing, call alerts, video connection, smart patrols, e-calls and smart attendance.

The location service provider also provides positioning system hardware, such as locator tags, capable of launching UWB signals to determine location; and positioning base stations, capable of receiving and estimating signals from labels. In addition, the location service provider provides an integrated SDK development platform to help developers rapidly develop applications based on UWB positioning systems.

• Downstream integrator

The positioning system integrator is at the downstream application end of the industrial chain and is responsible for providing application solutions to end-users.

8. UWB indoor positioning market risks

• Low penetration of indoor positioning techniques in the context of lack of specifications and privacy concerns

Indoor positioning systems still do not form a strong organization for the development of harmonized technical norms, and the current technology is developed under private agreements and programmes defined by each enterprise. The diversity, fragmentation of indoor positioning applications, together with the absence of uniform industry standards, make it difficult to apply positioning techniques in all industries, which is a major constraint on the development of indoor positioning.

Some people have doubts about indoor positioning systems, fearing that real-time location displays, video-linking, etc. in the positioning system may violate their privacy. Enterprises and individuals have low recognition of indoor positioning, which hinders access to markets.

• Low interest in utilizing indoor positioning technology

Most enterprises do not understand the importance of indoor positioning for the safety of people and materials, leading to low utilization of UWB positioning technologies. Industry needs a process of awareness and adoption of this relatively new technology, and business models around which new applications are derived, so there is a risk that the relevant markets will be slow to start and that the companies will not perform as expected in a short time.

9. UWB indoor positioning related companies

• Siemens

Siemens (Berlin and Munich) is a global technology company that has supported the internationalization of engineering innovation for 170 years. The company operates around the globe, focusing on electrification, automation and digitization. Agilion, a supplier of the industrial UWB real-time positioning system, focuses on production, logistics and maintenance applications, enabling precise positioning within a centimetre range and tracking a wide range of different assets.

• Zebra

The Zebra Technology Corporation (Zebra) has been working in recent years on the technological expansion of positioning solutions, and its latest Dart UWB technology goes far beyond passive RFID. The program uses advanced software and hardware to locate, track and manage high-value assets, equipment and personnel to maximize their use. Zebra can provide integrated solutions based on different positioning techniques, such as hyperwidth (UWB), ISO/IEC 24730-2, Cisco ® CCX Wi-Fi.

Compared to the advanced countries, our country is still in a state of development in the field of wireless communications, and through the study of UWB technologies, we can take full advantage of the latter, which will be more directed and targeted, thus making it possible to achieve and surpass the world ' s advanced levels in this field, to promote the overall development of our country ' s positioning technology in the UWB interior, and to establish new economic growth points in the country ' s autonomous intellectual property and related products in this field.