GPS World, March 2016

WI FI BEACONS Indoor Nav at Vast Mobile World Congress ADD INFRARED AIDING IN RETAIL SHOW MARCH 2016 WWW GPSWORLD COM GPS WORLD 17 LIDAR Industry Effort Pushes Beyond LOS UAV Flight A t the International Lidar Mapping Forum in February two organizations announced an industry consortium to push for removal of barriers to use of drones in long distance inspections The presentation by Sharper Shape and Edison Electronic Institute made the point that UAVs specifically lidarequipped UAVs offer potential for more frequent and more affordable inspection and data capture for overhead assets such as power lines Currently Federal Aviation Administration FAA regulations restrict commercial operations to visual line of sight VLOS The EEI Sharper Utility project will advocate for beyond visual line of sight BVLOS flights The presentation explored such issues as Types of information obtainable during UAV inspections and how that information can be used to improve infrastructure and asset management programs How UAVs provide a cost effective alternative to traditional inspection methods and the critical factors contributing to cost efficiency Why industry wide coordinated effort is required to institute change Steps and the key principles to enable commercial scale drone operations for the electricity industry Identification of stakeholders and the regulators The anticipated date of permitted BVLOS drone flights in U S utility inspections The Eyes of Texas In related news Xcel Energy announced a UAV flight research and development mission that traveled beyond the operators line of sight during survey of a transmission line in the Canadian River Breaks region north of Amarillo Texas in early February Two contractors piloted the lidar equipped Vapor 55 drone Xcel began using unmanned aircraft to visually inspect substations in 2015 and is the first utility to receive and use the FAAs certificate of authorization to perform a mission for research and development purposes beyond visual line of sight Xcel Energy inspects 320000 miles of electricity and natural gas infrastructure including more than 1000 substations gas regulator stations and dozens of major power plants in eight states GPS World will carry further news of this flight in a subsequent issue A scalable indoor positioning hybrid technology from Pole Star of Toulouse France combining GPS Wi Fi Bluetooth Low Energy beacons and motion sensors and MOCA of Barcelona Spain with a location based mobile engagement platform provided show navigation guidance and tracking for the GSMA Mobile World Congress in February The joint solution delivers three service levels that combine users geolocation with other data to provide expanded contextualized messages As many as 95000 show attendees iOs and Android users alike were guided through the 240000 square meters 26 million square feet of the FiraBarcelona receiving personalized notifications from an intelligent recommendation system based on proximity Using geofencing the 2200 exhibitors could interact with attendees and attract them to theirs booths Finally indoor location analytics enabled the event organizers to visualize and correlate behavior and preferences of attendees Infrared Pole Star also announced at the Retail Big Show in New York in January that it is integrating its NAO Campus indoor positioning technology with the Pricer Product Location solution based on Infrared trilateration The combination will enable shoppers once inside a store to optimize their shopping route and be guided to the products and promotions they are looking for Hyper local targeting for shoppers and Indoor location based analytics for retailers and brands are among the benefits touted Pricer based in Uppsala Sweden offers in store automated product positioning using infrared IR communication combined with tracking algorithms to calculate the position of its electronic shelf labels ESLs A typical Pricer label response signal is seen by multiple points in the communication network reading different signal strengths depending on the distance from the label Automated in store product positioning in retail is a holy grail for retailers according to the company By mapping in real time where the products are placed on the sales floor using the IR technology companies can engage customers in the aisles help customers find products and manage product placement compliance