Q: What is the focus or difference between Bluetooth AOA and UWB, which are commonly used for indoor high-precision positioning applications?
A: Need to understand the respective advantages of two excellent positioning technologies
1) The advantages of Bluetooth AOA come from the Bluetooth ecosystem, which has good openness, low cost, long battery life, and multiple application scenarios;
2) The advantages of UWB technology come from higher positioning accuracy, which is suitable for open and tunnel environments;
By grasping the core advantages, one can understand their respective application scenarios; Abandoning the inherent idea of technological mutual competition;
From the perspective of the customer’s business scenario, help them analyze what is the most suitable solution.
Q: Besides hardware cost advantages, what other advantages does AOA have compared to UWB?
A: The advantage of hardware cost is also a relative proposition, even a pseudo proposition, which requires a holistic solution approach to consider the overall cost of ownership. The core advantages of AOA come from the ecological advantages of Bluetooth, which are openness, more choices, low battery power consumption, and low maintenance costs.
Q: Will the Bluetooth AoA positioning system be affected by obstructions? Can the signal pass through walls?
A: The radio frequency signal of any wireless indoor positioning technology will be affected by solid walls, metal walls, and water walls, and the wireless signal will be blocked and attenuated. It is usually recommended that the tag and the base station be deployed to work under visual conditions. In principle, all indoor positioning technologies do not discuss the possibility of penetrating walls, and are working hard to limit the signal through walls through algorithms.
Q: In what scenarios is HoneyComm’s AoA Plus fusion positioning mainly used?
A: HoneyComm mentioned that the idea of fusion positioning can be applied to all positioning application scenarios in principle.
Because any single positioning technology cannot meet all application requirements in a real business scenario. Therefore, under the condition of a reasonable project budget, it is an inevitable trend to adopt appropriate technical solutions or even a fusion of multiple technologies to meet the segmented needs of each application scenario; the most typical fusion technology should be the fusion of RSSI+AOA positioning technology, giving full play to the advantages of the Bluetooth ecosystem. Of course, there are other fusion technologies such as iBeacon+AoA fusion, LoraWan+AoA fusion and UWB+AoA fusion. The specific technology to be adopted needs to be selected according to the actual business needs and project budget of the project.
Q: What technical requirements does HoneyComm AoA solution have for customers?
A: In principle, HoneyComm will not directly connect with end customers, but there are requirements for partners:
1) If the other party is a software developer, it can complete the API connection of the CLE engine;
2) If the other party is a solution provider, it can complete the software and hardware solution integration of the overall solution;
3) If the other party is a system integrator, it can complete the integration and implementation of the overall solution;
Q: Does HoneyComm’s Bluetooth AoA positioning system support ordinary Bluetooth tags on the market to achieve high-precision positioning effects?
A: The broadcast of ordinary Bluetooth tags on the market is the beacon broadcast protocol. The protocol broadcast does not contain the signal data format required for Bluetooth aoa positioning. Therefore, ordinary Bluetooth Tag tags cannot be directly recognized by Bluetooth AoA base stations.
In order to enable Bluetooth hardware devices on the market to be positioned by AOA base stations, it is only necessary to update the firmware of the Tag through embedded software according to the AOA broadcast protocol provided by HoneyComm. Without changing the hardware, it can be upgraded to a product that can be positioned with high precision of about 1 meter by HoneyComm Bluetooth AOA base stations.
Q: Ordinary BLE solutions are affected by environmental factors and will be inaccurate. Bluetooth AOA is centimeter-level positioning. Is the AOA solution not afraid of interference from the on-site environment? Or are there other means to overcome this problem?
A: All RF positioning technologies are affected by environmental factors. Bluetooth AoA can support so-called centimeter-level positioning under ideal laboratory conditions, but it is not recommended to raise customer expectations when communicating with customers. The accuracy that can be delivered in real business scenarios is about 1 meter for Bluetooth AoA, which is reasonable in cost performance.
1) Bluetooth AoA overcomes the weaknesses of the traditional Bluetooth RSSI signal strength algorithm through multi-antenna design and angle phase change algorithm;
2) If you need to achieve a good positioning effect, you also need the overall coordination of software + map + base station + tag + engineering implementation;
Q: Can AOA positioning identify and locate vertically stacked items? For example, the position of each tray in several stacked trays.
A: Under normal circumstances, Bluetooth AoA only provides xy coordinates of the two-dimensional plane, and the direct answer is that it cannot accurately identify vertically stacked items; but there are many ways, such as: by adding sensors such as barometers to the tag end, the logic of shelf stratification can be realized [height error needs to be considered]
Q: Will the AOA positioning accuracy of 0.3-0.5M centimeters and sub-meter positioning change with different usage scenarios and different product types? Will the accuracy always remain in the same range? If not, under what circumstances will the accuracy change?
A: A very good question. The accuracy of all wireless radio frequency positioning technologies will be affected by environmental factors, so changes are inevitable. There are many environmental factors, especially the reflection of metal, the influence of human body moisture, etc. All our work and efforts are just to control this change.
