Real-time asset tracking in warehouses and factories is an important aspect of Industry 4.0. Various technologies are available for deploying Real-Time Location Services (RTLS) for asset tracking and improving logistics systems. Global Positioning Systems (GPS) are widely used for outdoor RTLS implementations, but the signals are not always available inside buildings. Wi-Fi is another choice, but it tends to have limited accuracy, requires significant power, and can be costly to deploy. Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is low power and has good accuracy but tends to be expensive. Industry 4.0 RTLS installations are increasingly turning to Bluetooth 5.1 direction-finding techniques because they combine high precision indoor positioning plus low power consumption, low cost of Bluetooth hardware, and low cost of deployments. It can be tempting for developers to design Bluetooth RTLS systems from scratch. Unfortunately, obtaining the radio frequency (RF) in-phase and quadrature (IQ) information of the angle-of-arrival (AoA) and angle-of-departure
(AoD) data required to calculate the position of a transceiver from the RF signal is challenging and requires the integration of multiple antennas. Even if the AoA and AoD data can be captured, location calculations can be complicated by numerous factors, including multipath propagation, signal polarization, propagation delays, jitter, noise, and more, before the location of the item being tracked can be accurately determined. Instead, designers can turn to Bluetooth wireless systems on chips (SoCs), RF modules, and antennas for use in Industry 4.0 RTLS applications. This article briefly reviews the performance tradeoffs of the various RTLS technology choices and describes how Bluetooth AoA and AoD location is implemented. It then presents Bluetooth SoCs and RF modules that include the software needed to quickly implement AoA and AoD-based RTLS, as well as related antennas from Silicon Labs and u-blox . Evaluation kits that can further speed time to market are also presented. The most commonly used indoor RTLS technologies are
Designers who can select from SoCs and modules that include the software needed to quickly implement the complex software required to deploy Bluetooth AoA and AoD
we get technical
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