RTLS Studio 1.6 Released!

By Petr Passinger | July 25th, 2018 | 6 min read

Scalability, both in terms of the size of area covered by real-time location system and the number of tracked devices, ensures our customers dramatically shorten pay-back periods and bring highly positive ROI. Sewio RTLS Studio 1.6 features a wide list of functional improvements with an accent on implementing and maintaining RTLS more efficiently due to improved scalability and performance. This is why Sewio 1.6 is by far the company’s most ROI-driven solution to date.

There aren’t two customer projects requirements for indoor positioning that are the same. While some require precise data for every single movement, its path and the ability to replay it, for others, simple Boolean information of “object is/is not in the tracked area” is sufficient. Of course, the first-mentioned requirement for having the true location comes with higher costs than the simple presence-detection use case. 

However, in a real-world scenario, each of the settings will win over the other within a single facility. Typically, within the corridors, hallways or specific “single-action” rooms, presence detection wins over true location as it requires only one anchor, while in vast warehouse space with daily traffic, the true location is essential.

Having the ability to use both approaches within a single system allows customers that would normally use only the true location setting to dramatically cut their costs and enable customers that would use only presence detection to get precise movement data, only in the areas where practical, therefore, can leverage the increased scalability of the system.

In Version 1.6, presence detection also receives the following advanced settings:

• Filtering based on the Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI)
• Minimal Time to Trigger to prevent erratic jumps
• Anchor specification for presence detection or true location modes
• … and more

For more information, please see the presence detection application note or check out our presence detection tutorial video.

We have enabled the parallelization of code across multiple processors, which resulted in a 30% performance increase during testing. Sewio RTLS 1.6 is now not only lighter on server load but keeps the system responsive even for huge projects with thousands of tracked objects, which is crucial for enterprise-level projects.  

When a covered area gets bigger and more complex, with other real-time location systems, the overall accuracy is unintentionally decreased due the signals coming from other rooms and sections. Sewio 1.6 covers this issue by adding easy-to-edit map annotations of walls, room exits and paths.

By using walls annotations, the high accuracy of the system is also preserved within huge and multipart facilities as the signals coming from behind the walls are ignored. Room exits annotations help to correctly identify where and when the object leaves to another section or room, while path annotations help to straighten regular trajectories. 

Accuracy has also been increased by leveraging the geometry of the anchors’ placement. This means that only the best fitting geometry is used for position calculation. Finally, the synchronization algorithm was increased for even higher precision.

RTLS Manager

• Sync stability has improved to visualize signal quality alongside synchronization stability; various tools/toggles have been added for a better user experience

• Optimization for a large number of anchors and tags—both GUI and server-side
• Batch calibration of barometers for multiple tags
• A system-wide check of anchor configurations added for a quick overview of any current (in)correct configuration(s).

Sensmap

• Reworked rendering, which now uses a GPU with fallback to CPU, and enables the smooth visualization of hundreds of moving tags
• A new editor for plan annotations of walls, exits and paths
• Automatic hiding of inactive tags

API

• Data for tags’ atmospheric pressure, temperature and height
• Easier WebSocket subscription to position updates by one request for all tags (batch operation)
• A convenient API endpoint for retrieving historical positional data (enables verbose positional information, paging, date filtering)
• A new metric within Sage for “Daily attendance”

Please do not hesitate to test drive the newest version of Sewio RTLS! Log into the portal and download the installation bundle. Are you a Sewio partner or customer and don’t have access to the portal yet? Please drop us a line at sales@sewio.net. 

For more information, please see the changelog and/or the RTLS Studio versions comparison.