Noccela HPR (High- performance Ranging)

Noccela, a leading Ultra-Wide Band location technology company has launched a new paradigm in the UWB industry

Noccela, a leading Ultra-Wide Band location technology company has launched a new paradigm in the UWB industry called High-performance Ranging (HPR) which provides the best features of Time Difference on Arrival (TDoA) and Two Way Ranging (TWR) in indoor and outdoor positioning. Combining expansive areal coverage of anchors, massive tag amounts, two-way communications, and hyper-high accuracy with long battery life. HPR is the new standard that winning real-time positioning solutions are built on.
Noccela entered the UWB field in 2015 with a mission to meet the ever-growing and demanding use cases. The Noccela team tested existing systems and technologies and after determining they did not meet their requirements decided to build their own unique approach. HPR has been developed to meet the needs of clients in multiple industries and scenarios. After 6 years of development and rigorous real-world testing, HPR has reached maturity and scalability.

WHAT DOES HPR ALLOW YOU TO DO?

Until now, TWR has been the UWB method of choice when high area coverage and low installation cost has been the primary target. However, RTLS systems typically have the need to handle a high amount of tags which is problematic with TWR. High tag capacity would allow the system to be utilized among many users and devices, while high area coverage of the anchors would reduce the installation and equipment costs and make the installation more effortless. With TWR the tag capacity is significantly lower compared to TDoA but with TDoA, the area coverage of the anchors is significantly lower than, with TWR. This creates a dilemma for decision-makers and HPR is the solution: HPR reaches the excellent level of coverage as we have seen before with TWR while offering the limitless tag capacity like TDoA.
HPR and TWR offer two-way communication while TDoA does not. Two-way communication can be used for example for over-the-air firmware updates, updating the configuration of the device, and receiving visual and auditory feedback from other devices and systems.
HPR is strong on both battery life and accuracy, making the usage of the system more effortless and reducing the operational cost. As discussed earlier in this article, HPR delivers the same accuracy level as TWR while at the same time offering improved battery life over TWR.

HOW CAN YOU START USING HPR?

Performance indicators of the system include:
• 1-5 years battery life depending on the use case.
• Up to 500 square meters coverage per anchor with hyper-high accuracy depending on the environment.
• Amount of anchors can be adjusted depending on accuracy requirements.
• Customer’s engineers have measured a maximum of 2 cm positioning error on our most accurate installation while moving 60 km/h.
• Limitless amount of tags.
• Up to 896 active online tags in a single radio coverage area when positioning frequency is 1 Hz. Lowering positioning frequency to 0.25 Hz quadruples the maximum amount to 3584.
• Two-way communications including over-the-air updates.

In areas where the accuracy requirement needs not to be in centimeters (e.g. outdoors applications), Noccela’s PaaS can be installed with fewer anchors than in indoor applications where accuracy is typically required in centimeters and objects may be moving at high speed. Even a one anchor solution for distance measurement is possible that underlines the flexibility of this technology.
Overall, the solution works so that the anchors make and gather measurements of the tags using UWB and transmit this information to the cloud where the actual calculation is performed and positioning data is returned for analysis and reporting via third-party API. Noccela is known for its cloud engineering competence but also offers local on-premises computing to sites where it is required.
There are multiple tag types for various industrial, indoor, outdoor, retail, and personnel use depending on the use case. All Noccela tags utilize the same HPR technology and two-way communication with low latency.

WHO IS THIS NEW TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPED FOR?

HPR is especially competitive in large environments due to the low number of anchors required, which also enables a low cost of installation. It supports different functionalities and use cases within industrial, healthcare, sports and security.

WHAT IS THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE LIKE WITH THIS NEWCOMER – HPR?

INDUTRAX is one of the leading providers of Location-aware Software and solutions. With their innovative software applications, they form a bridge from technologies for detecting position, identity, and characteristics to enterprise applications as well as shop floor equipment and logistics. Indutrax uses their experience to deliver pragmatic solutions and provide ongoing support to their customer’s operations. Indutrax and its engineers have thoroughly tested the HPR technique used in Noccela’s solution.
“After understanding the technology and the way it can be modified to multiple use cases, I believe it was the thing we were missing from our portfolio and we are keen to use it in customer projects. We are just about to address customer demands to be used as the technology base for several industrial use cases. ” states Jörg Poswig, CEO of Indutrax.
Whereas Neil Salem, CEO of NESA says “It has been a pleasure to work with Noccela’s team and technology. We tested and deployed their hardware in an extremely complicated and harsh environment and the results were better than expected. Their technology requires substantially fewer anchors to provide one of the best Dot on the map in the industry Noccela’s HPR truly provided precise location data. We believe we have found one of the winners within the positioning space that can satisfy multiple industries and our global partners’ requirements.”
NESA Solutions is a global market leader in the advanced location industry, building a leading-edge business application to maximize the value of IoT location data. Based out of Miami, FL NESA has been one of our first partners to validate and bringing this new technology to a broader market.

SUMMARY

Affordable new technology is now available within UWB which improves its overall adaptability. This technology enables bespoke applications to tackle various challenges.
While there is a new innovation in our hands, we are surely all looking forward to what is coming next. Shall it be a state-of-the-art installation tool to automate the process? Stay tuned..