Russ Chandler from Ubisense gave me a bit of a tour beyond the indoor location demonstration that launched the conference. When I asked what's ahead, he was quick to point to embedding sensors into building infrastructures. That way, the challenges of setting up, tuning and then removing sensors that his and the Fish team faced at our location would be moot. In fact, Ubisense partners are out trying to convince venues such as convention centers to consider such investments.
Mostly, however, Chandler wanted to share the success of its tag in automobile manufacturing. Manufacturing is one place where UWB uptake and ROI have blossomed. The most impressive implementation involved the time saved by workers on the production line of a European automaker. Building a vehicle involves its passage through some 150 stations. In the past, workers used bar code scanners to confirm a task had been completed. That meant picking up the scanner, swiping it over the code, putting it down and picking up a tool. Now, the tools carry RFID tags and, in a sense, "confirm" the task completion on their own. That, in one case, means a task has dropped from taking 56 second to 50 seconds. That in turn can mean greater productivity on the line and more cars made per day. Ideally, such tagging also enables the prevention of errors, but if not, they are found and then fixed in place, another time saver.
Link to full article
