When it comes to mobility, where something is and where it is going are among the most powerful pieces of information a system can have. That principle applies to vehicles on the road — but it also applies to the driver, the passengers and any vulnerable road users nearby, such as pedestrians and bicyclists.
Ultra-wideband (UWB) has emerged as a promising wireless technology for determining the locations of objects with precision in certain applications.
UWB-enabled devices use frequent, low-power pulses of radio waves over a wide swath of the electromagnetic spectrum — a bandwidth of more than 500 MHz — to communicate with other UWB devices. In the early 2000s, companies considered UWB for data-transfer applications, mainly between consumer electronics devices, but performance was lower than initially expected.
However, it turns out that UWB excels in precision locating, which has made it very relevant to mobile devices. The biggest game changer has been the inclusion of UWB support in major smartphones, which allows a vehicle system to know the locations of the people carrying them.
As OEMs look to take advantage of this trend and include more UWB devices in their vehicles, optimizing those systems for cost and maximum effectiveness will be crucial — as will moving beyond using UWB simply for phone-as-a-key applications to enable a range of potential features.
Read our white paper to find out more about UWB’s possibilities.
