The Maze Within: Unveiling the Complexities of Indoor Asset Tracking
While GPS reigns supreme in tracking assets outdoors, navigation in an indoor environment presents a unique set of challenges. Tracking that critical piece of equipment or locating a misplaced tool often feels like a frustrating treasure hunt. In this article we'll explore a range of methodologies to track your tools, equipment, and inventory with surprising precision, bringing order to the indoor chaos.
Various technologies are employed today to track assets in GNSS-denied environments. The four most used include RFID, WiFi, Bluetooth, and Ultra-Wideband, with other wireless protocols and topologies emerging as technologies evolve. Within each of these technologies, several different techniques are employed to deliver the location intelligence required, and often several are augmented together to achieve a more robust outcome.
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID): By far, this is one of the more mature technologies used today. It employs a technique of placing tags (the IDs) on the moving assets, which communicate with strategically placed readers. As the asset moves past a reader, the ID of the asset is “read” as it transitions through that point, defining its location as a proximity to the most recent journey past a reader.
Bluetooth: Emerging as a popular choice, Bluetooth tags can be a cost-effective way to determine the location of an asset more precisely. Using a similar topology as RFID, a Bluetooth system has many strategically placed readers (typically called anchor points) to “read” the ID of a tag and determines the strength of the received signal (proportional to its proximity to the anchor). Newer Bluetooth (AoA) anchor points use an antenna array to augment the received signal strength with the angle that the Bluetooth tag is transmitting from. Taking this a step further, when a tag is observed by multiple anchor points, triangulation techniques are used to determine location more precisely.
Wi-Fi: This method leverages Wi-Fi infrastructure to track assets. By analysing the signal strength of a Wi-Fi enabled tag from various Wi-Fi access points, the system can estimate that asset's location. It is a cost-effective solution for basic location awareness only.
Ultra-Wideband (UWB): This technology provides the most precise indoor location tracking, ideal for high-value assets or scenarios requiring extreme granularity. It employs a similar technique as Bluetooth to determine a tag’s location but uses Time-of-Flight (ToF) instead of Ange-of-Arrival (AoA) for triangulation calculations and typically delivers much higher precision.
Choosing the right asset tracking solution can be complicated, and the best option is very use case dependent. In a rigid, automated manufacturing production line environment, the simplicity of an RFID is an adequate and elegant solution as readers are typically located at points in the process that delineate key manufacturing milestones. Conversely, a manufacturing workshop is more likely to employ a AoA Bluetooth solution to track the location of tools and mobile assets, allowing users and managers alike to easily determine its location. As such, one size typically does not fit all applications, and as a result, what we’re seeing evolve today is the augmentation of various techniques and technologies into a single user environment to reduce the use case dependencies. As an example, we’re seeing the introduction of products where radio technologies like Bluetooth (that is already employing receive signal strength) are being augmented with techniques like Time-of-Flight (derived from UWB) to offer the best of both worlds to provide a more effective asset tracking solution.
So, while indoor asset tracking presents its challenges, understanding these complexities is the first step towards a more efficient and streamlined tracking experience. By carefully considering your needs and leveraging the latest advancements, you can transform your indoor environment from a frustrating maze into a map of opportunity.
Reach out to SimplexIoT to draft a map today.
