Long Range UWB Location at Ultra Low Temperatures

Ultra Wide Band (UWB) provides a precise real-time location system which delivers very high positional accuracy in traditionally challenging environments. The Ultra Low Temperature (ULT) variant of our standard UWB sensor is ruggedized to give excellent performance characteristics in even the harshest of environments – operating at temperatures down to -40°C.

Patented Technology

The Ex UWB Long Range sensor forms part of the S3 ID’s patented e-locator™ long range personnel location system which includes:

• Active (battery powered) tags which transmit UWB pulses used to determine their location.
• Sensors mounted on fixed infrastructure which receive and evaluate the signals from the tags.
• Software platform to aggregate the positional data generated, presenting, analysing and communicating information to users and relevant information systems

Operation

The tags transmit UWB pulses of extremely short duration which are received by sensors and used to determine where the tag is located using a combination of measurement methods. The use of UWB together with the unique sensor functionality ensures both the high accuracy and the reliability of operation in challenging environments where there are often disturbing reflections from walls or metal objects. Sensors are grouped into cells which are typically rectangular in shape with additional sensors being added to a cell depending on the geometry of the area to be covered. In each cell a master sensor coordinates the activities of the other sensors and communicates with all the tags whose location is detected within the cell. By designing overlapping cells, it is possible to cover very large areas in a similar way to the cellular layout of a mobile telephone network.