“In today’s fast-paced world of manufacturing and logistics, there is an ever-growing need for a seamless, efficient solution that can effortlessly track assets, whether they are indoors or outdoors. That’s why we’re excited to announce our new partnership with Sensolus. Their advanced GPS tracker combined with the Quuppa system is the answer to this pressing demand, revolutionising the way we monitor and manage assets.”
Sammy Loitto, CEO of Quuppa
For over a decade, and with more than 250,000 connected assets in the field, Sensolus has made the Internet of Things (IoT) technology accessible to the industrial manufacturing, transport & logistics, and waste management industries. By relieving customers of the burden of complexity, this scalable tracking solution automatically translates location data into insights.
With the clear need for high-precision tracking solutions in the market, many of our customers have been looking to complement the current Sensolus portfolio with third-party high-precision technology. After validating the different protocols and partners in the field, Sensolus has chosen the Quuppa Bluetooth®-based solution for indoor high precision.
“The indoor location tech space is very dense, and technologies like Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) are focused on very accurate (cm level) and real-time detection, which comes with important upfront investments for infrastructure and the electronic tags themselves. But with Quuppa, we piggyback on a cheaper BLE chipset while offering high location accuracy. This is exactly what our customers need – an affordable, reliable, and complementary solution that offers sub-meter accuracy for when it is really needed.”
Kristoff Van Rattinghe, co-founder and CEO of Sensolus
Full visibility on an industrial scale
Sensolus trackers operate without any additional infrastructure, making the solution ideal for industrial companies looking for a full visibility solution for their logistical flows.
In essence, by attaching a tracker to a load carrier, its location and condition are indicated on the cloud platform, which records the asset’s data as it moves between different zones of interest, for example, factories, subcontractors, warehouses, and customer sites.
All this data is then translated into meaningful insights to manage inventory scheduling, analyse logistical flows, detect retention of load carriers, organise reverse logistics, analyse anomalies and send alerts when payload conditions have changed (e.g. temperature) or when load carriers are in the wrong logistical flow.
Sensolus has delivered these actionable insights for more than 200 industrial customers in aerospace, automotive, construction, equipment leasing, waste and many more.
Reliable and accurate Quuppa solution
While outdoor positioning is possible using the trackers alone, for further insights into the behaviour of their assets inside their own premises, customers look to Bluetooth beacons and Wi-Fi sniffing, which provides 10 to 25-meter position accuracy. These are affordable indoor solutions, but due to their intensive production processes, some companies need to achieve location accuracy of about 1 meter.
Quuppa’s Intelligent Locating SystemTM is an established solution for such high-precision location tracking. Many companies have already successfully deployed this solution in key areas of interest and can track assets accurately thanks to specific Quuppa-compatible Bluetooth tags.
The best of both worlds: marrying zone precision with high precision
Sensolus has implemented the Quuppa technology on its flagship NB-IoT (Narrowband Internet of Things) trackers. Because of this, customers can achieve full visibility everywhere (with zone precision) with the additional benefit of achieving a very high precision location in Quuppa-enabled areas. The asset locations remain known even when being transported to other sites, suppliers or customers, whether indoors or outdoors.
Before, such a combination was only possible by equipping assets with more than one tracker and required cumbersome integrations to combine both location data sources. With the combined Sensolus and Quuppa solution, seamless integration is available and accessible through a single online software platform.
As part of the partnership, the Quuppa-compatible Sensolus trackers are tested by Quuppa, confirming that they meet the Quuppa standards, allowing high precision detectability.
“The core DNA of Sensolus is solving engineering challenges for our industrial customers with our proven recipe of validation and reliability (our Sensolus quality label). The partnership with Quuppa is no different. It is complementary to our existing solution, it fits a clear requirement for our customers, and the technology has proven to be the best out there in terms of quality/price. We welcome the Quuppa tech stack and team in our solution. Welcome to the Sensolus family!”
Kristoff Van Rattinghe, co-founder and CEO of Sensolus
Balancing features with affordability
Sensolus has validated a variety of high-precision positioning technologies, for example, ultra-wideband (UWB), which provides an accuracy of up to 1 cm. However, this would be like using a “sledgehammer to hit a nut” when we consider the typical needs of our customers.
When taking cost into consideration, relying on a standard Bluetooth® protocol for indoor positioning, both for low accuracy with battery-powered Bluetooth® geo-beacons (i.e., 10 to 25 meters) and Quuppa for higher accuracy (i.e., sub 1 meter), Sensolus creates the opportunity to combine different technologies, each with its benefits and related costs, in a single solution.
This flexibility directly translates into the most effective and affordable solution for each customer.
| Technology | GPS | Wi-Fi | Bluetooth® (geo-beacons) | Bluetooth® (Quuppa) | UWB |
| Outdoor | ✔▪ | ✔▪ | ✔▪ | ✔▪ | ✔▪ |
| Indoor | – | ✔▪ | ✔▪ | ✔▪ | ✔▪ |
| Accuracy | 5-10m | 10-25m | 10-25m | 1-3m | 10 cm |
| Battery use | Medium | Low | Low | Low | High |
| Infrastructure | – | – | Limited | Yes | Dense |
| Wiring | – | – | – | Yes | Dense |
| Installation | – | – | Self-install | Certified installer | Certified installer |
| Cost | Low | Low | Low | Medium | High |
Conclusion
This technology partnership empowers our customers, especially with high precision needs to improve the accuracy up to the sub-meter level. As the Quuppa solution natively integrates with the existing Sensolus solution, it is a complementary extension that can be added at any time. This flexibility ensures our customers have access to high-precision indoor positioning, further enriching their operational capabilities.