FiLo
danalto’s fine-precision RTLS and positioning intelligence service
FiLo uses state-of-art software distribution, orchestration and machine-learning techniques to deliver the best indoor and outdoor RTLS services and positioning intelligence services to our customers.
With FiLo, you can add positioning intelligence to any IT solution and service stack. You can model your assets your way and gain the real time and historical insights you need for your people and assets. FiLo works at 4 levels.
Application
To make positioning-informed insights available to your web service application-level in a cloud-deployed context, danalto’s FiLo APIs have been designed for scale and low latency commensurate to UWB RTLS performances. To this end, he danalto Cardinal platform, as an enterprise-scale IoT computational platform, supports FiLo Service scaling requirements.
The target-use in FiLo application-integration design is the cloud-deployed FiLo-user web service application. FiLo APIs and application integration frameworks deliver secure, authorised access, ease of integration, high throughput, low latency and adaptive information transfer rates.
In FiLo service, your application use-case can be accommodated with a software model of your asset and the key attributes that can benefit from RTLS. FiLo can report real-time position for these asset-attributes. For example, you can search for and filter your asset information using these attributes.
FiLo then allows you to attach a FiLo device to such an asset, detach the FiLo device from the asset when you no longer need RTLS for it, attach another FiLo device if needed, and get RTLS and historical reports for the asset, irrespective of the device(s) used to track it. Your operations team or indeed, your web application, can deal with the positional information of the asset, rather than the FiLo devices that were used in it’s tracking.
FiLo enables you to create zones and points of interest, plus the logic between them, as features in your enterprise. You can specify the FiLo notifications that you or application receive, based on real-time positional relationships of groups of your assets to these features, designing the rules by which your business gains positional insights.
The features and the FiLo notifications (their definition and their rules-driven activation as FiLo asset positions change in real-time) can be controlled and integrated with your enterprise applications across high-performance APIs.
The FiLo service is secure by design, with state-of-art strong authentication, role-based authentication and OAuth-enabled FiLo service-access enforced throughout FiLo. Our APIs align with the Omlox Hub API.
Positioning
Measurements (see later) having been taken, selected, and optimised for performance, now come to the heart of the FiLo service: positioning. Danalto’s software-oriented approach allows RTLS (transitions from measurement à position à insight) to happen as and where it suits your use-case best.
The power of UWB for indoor RTLS is that many measurements can be taken per second, discriminated for direct-path versus reflected-path ranging, aggregated, filtered, converted to positions, smoothed and then translated to velocity, intent, and insight, with all of these data-points changing multiple times per second. For example, in collision-avoidance of UWB-tracked robots, it is not unusual that UWB measurements for each robot are taken 50 times per second. Even if we consider “smoothed” position-based insights being output at, say 10 times a second per robot, the software processing-chain needs must have high performance and low end-to-end latency at scale.
FiLo’s software design uses state-of-art distributed software processing and data-handling to achieve this. We have deployed this software as a turnkey RTLS Service on the public cloud, consumable across our API-compatible Web APIs. Our implementation using open software and compute technologies enables scale-up/scale-out in both performance and functional extensibility. By design, FiLo can also be deployed in private cloud. And it can be distributed across devices, edge-compute resources (such as embedded OS in Wi-Fi Access infrastructure) and enterprise datacentres.
The RTLS data can be analysed for characteristics that are specific and unique to your deployment environment. By having all FiLo RTLS data centralised, whole business and process data analytics, pattern recognition/training and anomaly detection in behaviour can be learned and improvements applied to your overall business FiLo service.
Measurements
Next to the FiLo measurements level. FiLo allows you to easily deploy and configure a variety of ranging devices, suited to your business. FiLo set-up tools allow the measurement devices to be securely on-boarded. Tools then use ranging measurements among the devices to check and optimise the performance of FiLo. Our software meets and helps to further RTLS standards such as those in FiRa™ and Omlox™ RTLS consortia, to make RTLS deployment practical and economic for all enterprise use-cases, across the entire RTLS service lifecycle. FiLo software ensures:
- the quality of the measurements.
- proactively adjusts configuration for measurement so that your use-case is best served.
- maintains and improves the quality of measurement in your deployment, by identifying performance-affecting changes, employing FiLo tools and expertise, to augment the deployment of your measurement infrastructure, to maintain overall FiLo performance.
With software-controlled coordination, the FiLo system makes the best measurements needed for robust service delivery in the harshest of radio environments, while optimising the work of centralising these in the cloud, for learning and adapting the FiLo measurement function, to your own environment.
To make the measurement layer practically deployable, danalto has engaged IT infrastructure-providers so that their infrastructure products can be FiLo-enhanced and allied FiLo device capability. An example of this is our integration with Cisco’s Application-Hosting framework, whereby you can place a FiLo UWB Anchor in each of your deployed Cisco Wi-Fi Access-Points, and centrally control the deployed configuration of these Anchors from your Cisco Spaces instance.
Devices
Finally, and where FiLo arguably starts is with practical, economic and performant devices that take the measurements needed. You need a healthy choice of end devices that suit your use-case. danalto works with best of breed hardware partners on a standards or Open hardware basis. We offer reference designs, device software based on open embedded Linux and micro-controller Real-Time operating systems, and secure device-onboarding, meet all IT procurement requirements.
From deep systems experience and extensive research and prototyping, we know which radio-ranging technology is best-of-breed for RTLS in complex indoor enterprise environments and Use Cases. Alongside our hardware-vendor partners, we offer FiLo validated devices which, combined with our licensable software, enable practical deployment of UWB, and other radios, without significant up-front cost. Our software-based approach also allows us to combine ranging technologies to match the best technology to your indoor RTLS use-case requirements, and, indeed, help you obtain smooth RTLS performance between indoor and outdoor environments.
With danalto’s FiLo software, ranging devices join RTLS subsystems and combine and join together so that the right measurements at your Enterprise deliver the FiLo RTLS service that you need.
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