Blue Origin uses Bluetooth arrival angle direction finding method

BlueSource uses Bluetooth arrival angle direction finding to provide high-precision location experience for thousands of industries

From general proximity solutions to high-precision positioning solutions, Bluetooth technology provides a range of reliable location services. Currently, Bluetooth location services have been widely used in a variety of scenarios such as indoor navigation and asset tracking, playing an important role in improving the operational efficiency of smart buildings and visitor experience. According to the "2021 Bluetooth Market Latest Information", the annual compound growth rate of Bluetooth location service device shipments will reach 32% from 2021 to 2025.

The direction-finding function has been added to the Bluetooth 5.1 core specification, which achieves centimeter-level positioning accuracy through the angle of arrival (AoA) and angle of departure (AoD) methods, greatly enhancing the performance of Bluetooth location service solutions. The BlueIOT positioning system is based on Bluetooth angle of arrival technology, which can not only reduce costs but also improve efficiency. It is an ideal choice for smart industry, warehousing and logistics, and healthcare institutions. In addition, Bluetooth angle of arrival technology is also very suitable for smart supermarkets, smart cultural tourism, and smart cities. While optimizing business operations, it can also provide users with precise location services such as indoor navigation and landmark search to enhance the overall user experience.

Li Jiarong, Director of the Bluetooth SIG Asia Pacific and China Market, said: "The BlueSource Positioning System is based on the Bluetooth arrival angle direction-finding method, which greatly improves the accuracy of Bluetooth positioning and achieves high-precision positioning capabilities. It can maintain stable and accurate sub-meter positioning effects in various complex scenarios, greatly improving the usability of indoor positioning technology."

Liu Jida, Product Director of Blue Origin, said: "As an open short-range wireless communication technology standard, Bluetooth can achieve flexible, secure, low-cost and low-power communication and location awareness between various digital devices within a certain distance. Its excellent technical characteristics are an important reason why Blue Origin chose Bluetooth technology."

Blue Creative Positioning Solutions Empower All Industries

Based on the Bluetooth arrival angle direction finding method, BlueIOT has created the sub-meter level BlueIOT real-time positioning system (RTLS) and indoor positioning system (IPS), which are mainly used in different industry fields involved in smart buildings, smart industries and smart cities.

In the warehousing and logistics scenarios of corporate business, BlueIOT cooperated with a domestic forklift group to realize the positioning of thousands of forklifts in the warehouse by deploying the BlueIOT positioning system based on the Bluetooth arrival angle direction finding method. The warehouse area of ​​the forklift company is close to 20,000 square meters, with an average of more than 3,000 forklifts, and many of them are customized models. Since a large number of forklifts frequently enter and exit the warehouse every day, there is uncertainty in the storage location of each batch. Warehouse managers have to spend a lot of time looking for the required batch of forklifts on a daily basis, and the average time to find a batch of vehicles is 10-15 minutes. After using the Bluetooth arrival angle direction finding method, the measured average time to find a vehicle is reduced to 1 minute/unit, which means that the efficiency has been improved by 90%. At the same time, the positioning tag used by the forklift can last up to 5 years, which is equivalent to less than 0.015 US dollars per day, which shows that the overall implementation cost of the project is low and the company has achieved cost reduction and efficiency improvement. The customer said that by using the Bluetooth arrival angle direction finding method of the BlueIOT system, the efficiency of the warehouse work has been greatly improved. In the future, they will also expand this technology to the production line, connect the product location information between the production line and the warehouse, realize the full process location control of forklift parts and complete machine production, and further improve the company's refined management level.

In the field of smart healthcare, the high-precision solution based on BlueIOT can realize in-depth applications such as intelligent medical guidance, in-hospital navigation, baby anti-theft, patient positioning, medical equipment asset management, and medical waste management. A university affiliated hospital where BlueIOT is located can achieve high-precision positioning of personnel by giving patients medical health positioning bracelets, helping medical staff to achieve refined and efficient management; on the other hand, it can also push diagnosis and treatment information to patients through Bluetooth, better provide patients with full-process diagnosis and treatment services, and improve patients' medical experience.

In the playground scene, Blue Innovation cooperates with many domestic indoor playgrounds to integrate the BlueIOT high-precision positioning system into the children's playground scene, effectively solving the safety and management problems in the playground. After putting a child positioning bracelet on the baby in the children's playground, parents can view the baby's location and area information in real time through the WeChat applet with one click, and quickly find the baby with the help of high-precision indoor navigation, so that the experience of bringing children to the playground can truly change from the anxiety of "looking for the baby all over the playground" to the beauty of "enjoying the moment of relaxation". Moreover, the preset alarm rules can provide pre-warning and in-process alarms when children enter dangerous areas, leave alone or have abnormal behaviors, protecting the baby's safety at all times. In addition, during use, the massive data of the positioning tag can be used by the background to count the number of people in each area and the venue heat map in real time, which can help the store dynamically adjust the operation plan and achieve intelligent management of the venue. In short, a series of capabilities based on high-precision positioning technology really make children happy, parents feel at ease, and the store worry-free in the venue.

Bluetooth Angle of Arrival Direction Finding Unleashes Potential in Industrial Commerce

In the commercial market, it is expected that the indoor V2X location service solution based on the Bluetooth arrival angle direction finding method will release potential. With the rapid development of social economy and the rapid growth of the number of cars in cities, indoor parking lots are gradually developing towards large-scale and multi-story directions. However, due to factors such as diverse designs, complex building structures, and unfamiliar terrain, users are likely to not be able to find parking spaces or forget the specific location and route of their parking when picking up their cars, wasting a lot of time in the parking lot, which also brings great inconvenience to users. In this regard, Bluetooth positioning technology can be used to provide real-time positioning for indoor parking lot navigation systems, and a mobile phone APP combined with Bluetooth positioning function can be developed to provide users with indoor parking lot navigation, plan driving routes in parking lots, and provide parking information, thereby helping users to find parking spaces or cars quickly and conveniently.

Based on the high-precision location service empowerment of V2X using the Bluetooth arrival angle direction-finding method, and with the help of intelligent parking lot transformation, in the future, it can be further combined with V2N (vehicle-to-cloud), V2I (vehicle-to-infrastructure), V2V (vehicle-to-vehicle) and other technologies as well as the vehicle's existing sensing equipment to achieve automatic valet parking in basement parking scenarios, laying the foundation for the "front one kilometer" of autonomous driving indoors.

In addition, in the industrial market, the Bluetooth arrival angle direction-finding method will also play an important role in the direction of intelligent manufacturing. High-precision location data, as an important component of the data flow of smart factories, is one of the three major data indicators of time, space and status in the business flow of smart factories; the accuracy, real-time and coverage integrity of spatial location data are important evaluation dimensions of the front-end perception quality of smart factories. The high-precision positioning management system based on indoor positioning technology can start from the difficulties and pain points of management of different types of manufacturing enterprises, and use indoor positioning technology to achieve accurate positioning of people, vehicles, objects, materials, etc. in the factory, and greatly improve the lean production and refined management level of the factory through seamless tracking, intelligent deployment and efficient collaboration.

At present, many industries such as automobile assembly, electronic manufacturing, and home appliance manufacturing are actively introducing indoor positioning technology to achieve efficient management within the factory. The Bluetooth arrival angle finding method positioning technology will play an important role in the efficient management of personnel in intelligent manufacturing, material tracking and production process tracing, and the search and error prevention of adapter tools.