On the initiative of Trumpf, around 60 industrial companies will be presenting the new Omlox positioning technology standard at the Hannover Messe in April. The new standard allows various localization technologies such as ultra-wideband, RFID, 5G or GPS to be connected together. The companies are thus responding to the increasing use of positioning solutions in industrial production. "The aim of the initiative is to make it easier for industrial customers to use hardware and software from different manufacturers. This saves the end customer effort and costs," says Thomas Schneider, Managing Director of Development at Trumpf. Until now, wireless technologies have often only worked on their own. Now it should be possible to display all location data in a uniform coordinate system. This will make it much easier for industrial customers to integrate solutions from different providers.

Fast and inexpensive networking

Omlox places particular emphasis on networking the factory as the heart of the supply chain. In order to be able to determine distances with centimeter accuracy there too, positioning solutions must be able to cope with metal, among other things, which deflects the radio waves. Ultra-wideband (UWB) has established itself here as a particularly robust radio technology. With the help of these radio waves, driverless transport systems or drones, for example, can calculate their position in space more easily and navigate better. Until now, solutions from different providers could not be networked with each other. Thanks to the new standard, devices from different providers can now be connected directly and combined with each other, as is already possible in the consumer sector with USB or Bluetooth technology via plug-and-play, for example.

Partners from Europe, the USA and Asia

The industry partners of the new UWB standard include companies from all over Europe, Asia and the USA. They include the software providers and IT service providers GFT and T-Systems, the providers of sensor-based solutions Sick and Pepperl+Fuchs, the research institute CEA Leti, the software provider Heidelberg Mobil and the localization provider BeSpoon. At the Hannover Messe, around 15 of them will be presenting the Omlox initiative to the public for the first time and demonstrating how localization solutions from different manufacturers could work together in the future (Hall 17, Stand D34). Omlox is open to further partners. Following the Hannover Messe, an independent organization will drive forward the development of the standard so that no project partner is disadvantaged in the future.