Profibus - Omlox - FHI, federatie van technologiebranches

A new PI standard for location technology

Since April 2020, the portfolio of PI International and local organizations such as PI Nederland has been expanded with a new technological standard: Omlox.

Omlox is the first open standard for location technology, developed by a collective of more than 60 industry partners. Omlox unifies various location services available on the market – including UWB, WLAN, BLE, GPS and 5G – and translates them into a single, unified coordinate reference system, making them available for internal use on edge platforms or for global use in the Cloud. Omlox is an interoperable ecosystem that harmonizes technical infrastructures.

The Omlox technology is – just like IO-Link – technologically independent of PROFIBUS and PROFINET. The working groups of the different standards operate independently, but can draw on the experience of the existing working groups if necessary.

Real-time location system
The focus of Omlox is to define open interfaces for a real-time location system. Omlox enables interoperability and flexibility between different providers within one or more tracking zones. Omlox consists of two parts: The Omlox hub and Omlox core zone and defines their interfaces.

Omlox Core Zone
The Omlox Core Zone works in combination with an open interface and ultra-wideband (UWB) technology. The UWB radio standard is often used for indoor localization tasks in factories, such as navigating automated guided vehicles (AGVs), autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) or drones in order to locate materials and/or orders. On the one hand, the Omlox air interface connects products (e.g. AMRs) and infrastructure (e.g. satellites). On the other hand, the Omlox hub API connects the core zone to the hub. Thanks to the interoperability, companies can easily network all Omlox-compatible UWB products, regardless of the manufacturer.

The benefits of ultra-wideband (UWB) technology?

• High accuracy and precision (<10 cm)
• Low sensitivity to interference (4 GHz)
• High data transmission speeds
• Low energy consumption
• Guaranteed interoperability

Omlox Hub

In addition to Ultra-wideband technology, other localization technologies such as RFID, 5G, Bluetooth, WiFi and GPS are often used in production, delivery and storage. The Omlox hub enables interoperability and flexibility between these different complementary zones.

What are the benefits?

• Open and interoperable
• Display of all elements in one overview
• Seamless asset tracking, both indoor and outdoor, without technical
limits
• Use of existing localization services
• Significantly lower depreciation costs
• Easy to implement (plug and play)
• Broad consortium with a wide range of products

A new PI standard for location technology

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