Item management system, Samsung begins to deploy IoT UWB market

In recent years, technology companies represented by Apple and Samsung have focused on the field of UWB technology. It is understood that in the second half of 2020, Samsung officially added UWB chips to its Galaxy Note20 series of smartphones. This also marks the beginning of the layout of the UWB industry ecosystem in the existing IoT terminal market, and will be used in a variety of scenarios in the future.

As a low-power ultra-wideband wireless communication technology, UWB is most directly applied in the smart home industry. At present, people have an increasingly strong demand for indoor item management. For example, there are all kinds of items in the room. How to effectively manage these items and quickly find the required items when needed is the primary content of indoor item management technology, and it is accompanied by a huge market demand from every household. However, existing short-range wireless communication methods such as WiFi and Bluetooth have more or less problems, and UWB technology has brought development opportunities for this market demand.

To this end, Samsung filed an invention patent entitled "A method and system for item management" (application number: 201911132189.9) on November 19, 2019, and the applicant was Samsung Electronics (China) R&D Center.

Figure 1 Schematic diagram of the composition structure of the item management system

In order to solve the problems existing in the prior art, the intelligent item management system proposed in this application is shown in Figure 1, which mainly includes a terminal identification unit, an identification detection unit, a positioning unit, an image collection unit, an image processing unit, an item management unit, an AR display unit and a storage unit, as well as a user preference analysis unit and a big data processing unit.

The terminal identification unit is a tag of the identified object, which serves as the identifier of the identification detection unit; the positioning unit locates and identifies the identified object based on the signal information of the former. UWB technology is mainly used here to achieve precise indoor positioning; the image collection unit is used to collect images of the identified object and send them to the image processing unit; the latter performs data processing on the collected images, identifies the basic information of the identified object in the image, and provides it to the item management unit, such as the name, color, volume and other basic attribute information of the identified object; the AR display unit can display the marking information in real time in the scene view for human-computer interaction.

Figure 2 Schematic diagram of the information collection process of the marked object

Referring to Figure 2, the image collection unit is first used to photograph the identified object, and then pattern recognition and image analysis are performed through convolutional neural networks (CNN) to identify the basic information of the identified object, such as name, volume, color, etc., and further combined with Internet big data to query the material, purpose, etc. of such items, and integrate and save them in the storage unit of the system server. At the same time, the smart tag (terminal identification unit) is placed on the actual item, and the smart tag is scanned to establish the association between the tag identification and other information of the item, and store it. All this information stored in the storage unit can constitute an item management library. When the user uses the identified object, the item management system can record the user's behavior based on the smart tag, read the data, and complete the entire process.

In short, Samsung's patent for an item management system applies UWB technology to the field of the Internet of Things, proposes an item management method and system to effectively manage and locate items in indoor environments, and uses AR technology to conduct clear and definite human-computer interaction with users, making smart home life more intelligent and comfortable.

UWB technology is a development trend in the future and will be applied to various existing IoT terminals, which will surely form a complete industrial ecosystem. With its own influence and market share, Samsung is believed to be able to shine in the UWB market in the future.