Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - TRAXEN tracking (TRAXEN – Ultra low power, long life tracking sensor)

Teaser

Reliable transportation, logistics was and is always a key question in our society. By the constant development of modern electric technology, we found new and new solutions to make logistic industry more reliable, more informative as a minor error in logistics can cause...

Summary

Reliable transportation, logistics was and is always a key question in our society. By the constant development of modern electric technology, we found new and new solutions to make logistic industry more reliable, more informative as a minor error in logistics can cause incredible problems, can affect lives, hospital patients, medications, food supply safety, primary energy needs, but also from loss in car industry, to loss in package forwarders, has very negative effects.
During our market analysis it is obvious that a smart tracking device, system is extremely waited by many industry segments, but currently there is no real usable solution in many aspects. We found the following customer pain points:

The problem we addressed are based on these industrial painpoints:
• There are millions, even billions of pallet/trailers/wagons/cars, assets, etc. in a we do not have any idea where they are once the unit left a warehouse.
• Millions of high value pallets/containers are lost yearly, their exchange process is expensive and painful , .
• Current solutions have not found the right answer for the industry need: in-house tracking is solved with cheap RFID tags, outdoor tracking is not solved, solutions are unnecessarily equipped (e.g. it would be enough to know that a trailer is in XYZ station, with couple of meters accuracy)
• Current solutions are very expensive (onetime fee + operation cost either), need extra effort and maintenance (charge batteries, deploy large units), and usually only last for days or weeks.
• There are new IoT solutions but they combine many technologies: tracking with GPS and BLE, data sending with IoT, which makes those complicated and very expensive.
• Companies cannot monitor their merchandise in an easy way real time.

Our developments address these problem and our goal is to provide a 10+ year operation life, continous trackin infromation system, which has these main features:

• Operates for years without any maintenance
• Operates indoor/outdoor and accurate
• Cheap enough to be used in an entire fleet (thousands or millions of pallet) giving value for money
• Small enough to be placed in e.g. an EUR pallet, tree trunk, car wheel, cooled drug box or a pet collar
• Gives real time monitoring
• Cannot be jammed – “I would like to trust”, therefore it can fit to other industry segments (like food chain tracking with blockchain technology)

With our system main features the mian economical and society benefit is that it can be viable to track almost any small assets, which can cause a decrease in asset loss, optimized transportation, saving cost and decreasing pollution, give better service reliability and decrease many indirect negative effects which caused by a simple fact that we do not know now exactly where are our goods during transportation.

The spectrum of our innovation project is: lab to market. Recent position of our business project: TRL 6 - technology demonstrated in relevant environment. The overall objective of our proposed Phase 2 project is to bring AELETIS to TRL9 ready for launch in the European and US market in 2021 (end of Phase 2, initial business period) with these main objectives: 1) Further optimize consumption, 2) Reduce hardware cost, 3) Implement value added software services (like marketplace)

Work performed

VALIDATION AND HIGH LEVEL SPECIFICATION Possible development alternatives and technical solutions were investigated with respect to the aimed TRL level (TRL9). Further technological developments contain 4 main aims to accomplish TRL9.

FREEDOM TO OPERATE ANALYSIS The freedom to operate search has been carried out with the following results: the analysis of patent documents led to the conclusion that there are only indirectly interfering patents as we only use standard 3GPP public protocols in our sensors. The indirectly interfering patents mainly valid for design, architecture of software, which needs to be further analysed before detailed system planning.

MARKET SURVEY, DETAILED BUSINESS AND COMMERCIALIZATION PLAN We have evaluated current and future market and we found the following: many companies are searching for solutions in the whole tracking industry, where one of the main subject is pallet tracking (“Smart pallet”). We found out that current solutions are 1) too expensive, 2) require continuous human maintenance (charge battery) or both. Novel or planned solutions use LPWAN technologies, but only for data communication so far. The solutions we can see now uses combined methods GPS + BLE + NBIoT which gives an accurate solution, but makes it very expensive in a very price sensitive market.

PROJECT PLANNING AND COMPILING PH2 PROJECT PROPOSAL Based on the feasibility and technical viability checks, a detailed project plan has been established utilizing PMP project planning methods. A 1.59 million EUR project was developed with the aim of developing TRL9 market ready tracking ecosystem.

Final results

Results of our efforts during Phase 1 and upon successful completion of the remaining phases, a market-ready novel tracking ecosystem (sensors and software) will be finalized to meet the targeted users’ needs and social challenges. With our novel ,purely NBIoT trackers overall tracking is more economic and as a consequence, tremendously larger industry can use tracking solution to provide a more reliable, safe and sustainable logistics. Also our product easily adoptable to privet usage, like pet tracking to improve overall prosperity.

Website & more info

More info: http://akkucomp.hu/aeletis-nbiot-asset-tracking/.