According to a recent announcement, at the LoRa Alliance All Members’ Meeting in London on January 25, Actility, a Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) developer, and Abeeway, a geolocation system specialist, have joined together to develop and commercialize a flexible location solution for the IoT by combining the precision of GPS with the low-power, long-range capability and low cost of LPWA.
“Geolocation and object tracking could possibly be the biggest use case for the internet of things given the amount of interest we’re seeing in our location service portfolio,” said Mike Mulica (News - Alert), CEO, Actility. “This is truly the best of both worlds. By working with Abeeway, we’ll be able to provide a best in class geolocation technology which will combine the network-based location capability offered within our ThingPark platform with device based GPS for high precision on demand.”
Abeeway, a ThingPark Market seller, is well-versed in creating tracking devices based on LoRaWAN that offer on-demand geolocation, movement alerts and geofencing. These trackers use GPS signals to determine location and more energy-efficient LoRaWAN communication to pass that location to the tracking applications.
“The fast growth of public LPWAN network opens a new era of LoRa applications such as asset tracking and geolocation services” said Florian Sforza, CEO, Abeeway. “Abeeway was a precursor in developing multi-mode trackers for LoRa network to enable dynamic optimisation of the power /position accuracy trade off. Working closely with Actility and integrating our geolocation solution in their ThingPark platform allows a fast deployment of geolocation applications for the end users.”
Actility and Abeeway are together developing the next iteration of this kind of technology, designed to use fewer satellites to determine location and reduce the GPS lock time to a few seconds. The power required for signal acquisition and processing is reduced, which results in an increase in battery life by an order of magnitude, the partners asserted. All of these capabilities will be integrated and accessible via a single API on the ThingPark X platform, capable of passing the data to customer cloud platforms, including IBM Watson, Microsoft (News - Alert) Azure and AWS.
“We’re delighted to be working with Abeeway to be pioneering this next evolution of IoT technology,” said Mulica. “We believe that this capability is a game changer for many industries, including logistics, supply chain management, precision agriculture, utilities and mining. It’s the ‘killer app’ for industrial IoT.”