BeSpoon Unveils Tools to Create Multiple Uses For its Ultraprecise 3D, Real-time Location Technology

With these hardware and software building blocks, system engineers have simple and economical tools for using BeSpoon’s high-precision RTLS technology in multiple applications for the Internet of Things (IoT), manufacturing, healthcare, home automation, gaming, emergency management and countless other sectors.

The building blocks allow quick prototyping of systems that can track virtually any object to within a few centimeters of its location, indoors or out, in three dimensions, using BeSpoon’s pioneering single-chip precision RTLS technology.

The importance of high-precision localization systems was highlighted recently by Google CEO Larry Page, who said location tracking should be precise within inches.

“BeSpoon’s RTLS system offers that capability today, and we are making it easy for system engineers to experiment with it, because we’re confident they’ll come up with hundreds of great ideas,” says BeSpoon CEO Jean-Marie André. “The huge range of today’s GPS-enabled applications shows what can be done with a combination of human creativity and reliable positioning data. Our technology enables something similar, but with full indoor compatibility, much greater location accuracy, and a level of robustness not found in any previously available solution.”

André added that the rapidly growing IoT would offer an additional level of functionality by providing communications infrastructure that can collect, manage and share precision location information.

The new packages enable Precise Inverted 3D, Precise Indoor GPS and Precise RTLS.

• The Precise Inverted 3D design package comes with a SpoonPhone (featuring an Android API to access the location data) and the inverted 3D software. The software is capable of computing its 3D location based on the positions of six fixed tags. This allows rapid testing and requires minimal hardware configuration.
• Precise Indoor GPS enables additional SpoonPhones to locate themselves just by listening to the tags. This also allows deploying an unlimited number of self-locating devices.
• Precise Location RTLS tracks in real time a set of tags whose locations are made available through a simple server connection.

With these capabilities, BeSpoon’s technology is ideal for single devices and server-centric solutions tracking multiple items. In a device-centric application, a moving device constantly computes its location and orientation within a 3D space. This approach could be implemented, for example, in a set of goggles to create a virtual-reality environment, or in a navigation system for a campus or mall. In a server-centric solution, a central infrastructure tracks locations of many individual items. This model could be used for tracking products in factories or on luggage conveyors in airports, among many applications.