INTRODUCTION

What is a RTLS?

• An Real-Time Location System (RTLS) is a system that provides live tracking of assets, people or equipment indoors or outdoors, typically with meter- to centimeter-level accuracy by means of positioning technologies like UWB, RFID, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or GPS and makes the location data available through dashboards, APIs, or integrated applications.

• An RTLS can be presented not just as a technology, but as an integrated component of a customer solution, which turns the location data into a strategic advantage.

• Industries such as logistics, manufacturing, healthcare, mining, retail, sports and entertainment use RTLS for asset tracking, worker safety, workflow optimization, inventory management, augmented reality experience and sports analytics.

Why Ultra Wideband based RTLS?

Ultra Wideband (UWB) is a positioning technology for applications requiring high-accuracy and low-latency in complex environments. Outdoors, GNSS works well and offers positioning accuracies up to cm-level. In indoor environments, Bluetooth LE (BLE) and Wi-Fi can only detect that something is ‘nearby’ in varying levels of accuracy — from around 1 metre to floor-level accuracy. UWB delivers decimeter-level accuracy with very low latency. A comparison between UWB and other RTLS positioning technologies is given in the table below.

Table 1.1: Comparison between UWB and other RTLS positioning technologies

Why the Eliko RTLS?

Eliko RTLS uses a proprietary Active-Passive Two-Way Ranging (AP-TWR) method for UWB communication that forms the backbone of the RTLS. It is an optimised two-way communication protocol that overcomes the shortcomings of two traditional UWB positioning techniques:

• Two-Way-Ranging (TWR) - low number of tracked tags because of a long protocol structure and related high device energy consumption.

• Time Difference of Arrival (TDoA) - device clock synchronisation requirements and severe limits to scalability and anchor placement in the tracking area.

The AP-TWR main principle is providing the active anchors with the functionality of passive ranging, making them so-called active-passive anchors. This ranging scheme allows each active-passive anchor to provide several range estimates during a single ranging sequence. Both TWR and TDoA provide only a single range estimation, while addition of passive-only anchors in AP-TWR provides more range estimates without increasing the number of transmitted packets (read more about AP-TWR here).

A comparison between Eliko AP-TWR and traditional TWR/TDoA methods is given in the table below.

Table 1.2: Comparison between Eliko AP-TWR and traditional TWR/TDoA methods

The Eliko RTLS benefits for different use cases

The Eliko RTLS can be adapted to almost any use case from 10 cm-level tracking to precise proximity-based solutions. It is especially relevant for environments with many moving objects (factories, warehouses, immersive gaming venues) where pure TWR is too slow and TDoA is too limiting to implement.

The Eliko RTLS has a number of advantages in different use case scenarios:

• Industrial automation:

  • Supports dense tracking of assets, vehicles, and robots without overloading the network.

  • Reduces infrastructure complexity compared to full TDoA since anchors do not require any synchronization.

  • Supports more flexible anchor network architecture compared to TWR and TDoA: for example, anchors can be mounted on moving machinery for on-machine distance measurement to other machinery.

• Worker safety:

  • Thanks to two-way communication, the RTLS can provide real-time proximity alarms on the tag with lower power consumption.

  • Supports collision avoidance by providing real-time distance measurement to other objects, which is not possible with TDoA.

  • Provides more ranging estimates during a single ranging sequence than TWR or TDoA, enhancing coordinate robustness in difficult environments.

• Entertainment:

  • Supports real-time tracking of many actors moving on a stage for automatic adjustment of lights, cameras and microphones.

  • Supports augmented reality experiences in multi-player immersive gaming scenarios by providing reliable tracking and player identification.