How well does UWB penetrate a typical office wall?
At a previous job we looked into locating. If you had two items parked on opposite sides of a common wall, you couldn't tell which rooms they were in. Which was critical for us since we did NOT want people wasting time running into the wrong room to grab it (think automated defibrillators)
When I played around with the Decawave chips mentioned in the article, not well. When going through walls there'd be some weird attenuation and maybe some multipath stuff that gave unusual results. Going through a wall could throw the results off by 10cm which I suppose would prevent you from knowing which side of the wall something is on.
It is tuneable and at low bandwidth it can have a range of several hundred metres, maybe 100m indoors. The location element uses time of flight which is less effected by walls than signal strength methods so should be accurate to within a meter even across a large building.
That was roughly the accuracy of the WiFi triangulation systems we looked at. And it wasn't accurate enough. The typical US office wall with metal framing studs is not quite 5" (127mm) thick, which would have been our worst-case (with the equipment touching the walls on both sides).
At a previous job we looked into locating. If you had two items parked on opposite sides of a common wall, you couldn't tell which rooms they were in. Which was critical for us since we did NOT want people wasting time running into the wrong room to grab it (think automated defibrillators)