Background
The customer, a company belonging to the Automotive sector, produces very large vehicles and in large quantities, which during the initial production phase are indistinguishable one from each other. Given the production needs, it happens that the semi-finished products are stored temporarily and without adequate tracking, in areas even hundreds of meters away from the point where they should actually be.
Challenge
The semi-finished products are stored both in the external and internal areas, preventing the adoption of GPS technologies. A first attempt to trace the location by making the forklift drivers responsible failed due to the high amount of man-time required for the timely collection of data. The single untraced semi-finished product leaves the production process, and returns only when it is identified, even weeks after when it was necessary, creating cascading delays and difficulties in monitoring production. The search, in fact, covers a very large area, which is covered by bicycle or with a forklift.
Solution
Our partner Bit Tonic,
to solve these problems, has chosen to adopt a Quuppa solution, equivalent to
AccuRTLS,
based on AoA (Angle-of-Arrival) technology. This technology makes possible to achieve state-of-the-art performance,
with real-time tracking and accuracy up to a few tens of centimeters in a real operating environment.
To develop this solution a BlueUp Forte+ Quuppa tag was installed on each semi-finished product,
in order to track the indoor position in a "traditional" way through ceiling-mounted antennas. In external areas, which
reach tens of square kilometers and where fixed infrastructures are often distant, an autonomous flight system with a
drone has been developed, capable of autonomously taking off, landing and following a predefined route that crosses
the areas where semi-finished products are usually stored. The drone has been equipped with an AoA antenna and is,
therefore, able to locate with an accuracy of one meter. In the event of bad weather or conditions unsuitable for flying,
an equivalent device was created and installed on the forklifts, which, during their outdoor movements, together with GPS
technology, identify the neighboring semi-finished products.
Results
The customer always has the position of his semi-finished products available in a totally automatic way, without involving his own workers in the localization activity.
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