In the beginning, our hardware and software were capable of just broadcasting and understanding iBeacon packets. But from the very start we’ve had a much broader vision and wanted to create an operating system for the physical world. One of the first steps was to release the Indoor SDK for iOS, which created a whole new area of possibilities for defining location based actions. Then we used all of our know-how in order to add the next brick to the foundation of our physical world OS, by creating the Android version of the Indoor SDK.
However, the physical world isn’t only for people. In industrial applications, robots start to play a major role and consequently they need to navigate and understand the physical world that surrounds them as well.
Locating people and robots
That’s why we are taking the next step and releasing an SDK for robotics. The SDK uses the same robust Location Beacons with UWB that we began shipping in May 2017 and provides you with precise, real-time positioning. A combination of Bluetooth and UWB signal measurements is used to precisely calculate the 2D coordinates inside a location.
It is fully integrated with our current stack. That means that you’ll be able to see the robot’s position in our Cloud, request it using our Cloud API, or even add robotic integrations to your mobile apps using iOS and Android Indoor SDKs. Using the SDK, it will take only a few hours to create an app for managing an entire fleet of your robots as the mobile SDKs will give you full information about their position. There are no limits in terms of the size of the location, or the number of robots that are simultaneously using the Estimote beacon infrastructure to position themselves. The robots will also be able to know one another’s position thanks to their connection to Estimote Cloud - or using Estimote Mesh when you are offline.
Raspberry + UWB beacons = Robot positioning in minutes
Indoor for robotics works almost the same way as Indoor for mobile phones, but instead of a phone there is a ROS (Robot Operating System) compatible hardware like Raspberry Pi. All you need to get started is at least two Location beacon with UWB devkits. Thanks to automapping, creating a map of the location that your robots navigate within takes only a couple of minutes, instead of hours when done manually. This saves you a lot of time, which you can use to create your solution. If you’ve already created a location using Location beacons with UWB, you won’t need to change or perform any other actions to prepare it for Indoor SDK for robotics.
The main part of this release is a ROS package which you can find here. You can easily integrate it with your ROS based robotic solution. You need to connect one of the beacons with your hardware solution using the beacon GPIO pins. They are used both to transfer the data and to power the beacon from your robot, as the beacon will require more energy to constantly collect, process, and transfer data to your hardware.
Since using the UWB module consumes much more power than broadcasting Bluetooth packets, we have also developed algorithms that will help optimize energy efficiency in the beacons that you place on the walls.
How do I get started?
If you are into robotics or if you want to know how to start your first project and integrate it with the Estimote stack, we encourage you to read this detailed technical post on how Estimote Robotics SDK works. There you will find a step by step tutorial describing how to set up positioning for your robot. You can purchase the Location beacons with UWB here:
If you have any questions don’t hesitate to contact our team. We will try to answer all your robotics related questions.
Contact us