MERLIN

Indoor location with IoT devices helps companies track both products and people in a specific space. This allows for easier navigation and greater security, which increases company productivity.

This solution has become one of the best opportunities in the market, as it makes work more accessible and secure for companies and their employees.

The MERLIN (MEcanismos Radio innovadores para la Localización en INteriores) project activity consists of building a prototype distance measurement system based on Ultra Wide Band (UWB) technology, which implements as a differentiating technology sequences with unique properties that make them especially valuable, to allow numerous nodes to share space and radio spectrum efficiently and reliably.

All this will be combined, in the proposed scenario, with the use of GPS technology outdoors and with an indoor solution developed based on commercial chips and, therefore, with limitations in terms of the number of nodes to be deployed. In addition, an exhaustive comparison of the alternatives is sought, trying to find the meeting point between the two that makes it possible to deploy a highly accurate service demanded by the market.

The product to be developed with the project’s technology will be a distance estimation system that will calculate, for proprietary UWB nodes, their separation with an accuracy better than 5 centimetres.

On the other hand, the application will be developed that allows, by combining the distance information of several nodes, to calculate the position of each node in a precise way.

The main difference with existing equipment is the ability to obtain accurate, high-frequency (several per second) and reliable (no failed attempts) measurements in high node density scenarios.

The state of the art has service degradation with more than 10 nodes, while this project is expected to be perfectly operational with up to 100 nodes, without a noticeable increase in production costs.