5G Positioning: What It Is and Industrial Applications
What is 5G Positioning and why do we need it?
Over the past few decades, we have grown accustomed to relying on GPS for all our navigation needs. Traditional satellite systems can provide accuracy within 10 meters outdoors. However, things get drastically more complicated indoors: building walls, metal structures, and the complexity of indoor scenarios block or degrade the satellite signal, often rendering GPS useless.
This is where 5G Positioning comes into play. 5G Positioning is a technology that uses 5G cellular network signals to calculate the exact indoor and outdoor location of a device (such as a smartphone, sensor, or industrial robot), overcoming the physical limitations of traditional GPS. Designed from the ground up to both communicate and locate, 5G introduces ultra-high-precision services to track pedestrians, vehicles, and assets in complex environments, from factories to dense urban traffic.
| Feature | Traditional GPS | 5G Positioning |
|---|---|---|
| Ideal Environment | Outdoors (Open sky) | Indoor and 5G Outdoors |
| Accuracy | Meters | Centimeters / Decimeters |
| Infrastructure | Satellites | 5G Antennas / Cells (e.g., FR2) |
| Obstacle Penetration | Low | Bypassed via dense indoor antennas |
How does it work? The technical explanation and an analogy
If you are wondering whether 5G uses the way the signal "bounces" to position objects, the intuition is partially correct, but there's more to it. In reality, continuous signal bounces (called multipath) have historically tended to confuse positioning systems. 5G overcomes this limitation.
How 5G FR2 cells improve indoor tracking
5G Positioning specifically leverages 5G FR2 cells (i.e., millimeter waves or mmWave) and very large-scale antenna arrays. These very wide bands allow for extremely precise time and angle measurements. Devices are located using standardized techniques such as Time of Arrival (ToA) (the signal's time of flight) and Angle of Arrival (AoA) (the angle from which the signal originates). Thanks to wide bandwidths, 5G isolates and eliminates the distortions caused by signal bounces on walls, ensuring accuracies that are impossible for 4G or traditional Wi-Fi.
5G Positioning vs Traditional GPS: A practical analogy
Let's make a parallel. Imagine GPS as a lighthouse at night: it is perfect for guiding ships in the open sea, but if you try to navigate inside a closed cave, the lighthouse's light will never reach you. 5G Positioning is like having a group of blindfolded people standing at the corners of that same cave. If you clap your hands in the center of the room, they don't use sight (satellites), but hearing. They understand where you are by measuring how much time it took the sound to reach them and from what precise direction the echo came. The more people there are in the room (more 5G antennas), the more millimeter-perfect the localization will be.
Where is it used: Factories, Remote Areas, and Safety
The practical applications are immense. Primarily, 5G Positioning shines in indoor environments or industrial scenarios (Industry 4.0), for tracking assets and ensuring safety.
- Industrial Environments and Robotics: Centimeter-level tracking of Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) to prevent collisions with humans, achieved through millimeter-wave technology.
- Locating and protecting people: Can 5G be used to locate personnel? Absolutely. In critical facilities, knowing in real-time if a worker is in a danger zone is fundamental for their safety.
- Remote Places without GPS: Can I use 5G Positioning in the middle of an isolated mine or an underground construction site? Yes, but with one essential condition: a Private 5G Network must be installed in that location. Once the local network infrastructure is active, tracking will work perfectly even hundreds of meters underground, acting as a perfect substitute for the missing GPS.
The 5G-SHIELD Project: SMA-RTY, MADE, and Italtel
To bring all this into reality, we at SMA-RTY collaborated with MADE - Competence Center Industry 4.0 (a research center in Milan that bridges academia and industry) and Italtel, to bring the 5G-SHIELD project to life.
The goal of 5G-SHIELD is to demonstrate how 5G Positioning can make industrial environments much safer in real time. The project focuses on industrial spaces where AGV robots (Automated Guided Vehicles) operate, leveraging 5G FR2 cells to enable advanced experimentation. One of the biggest challenges we are tackling is precisely identifying and preventing warning situations that arise when the trajectories of a human operator and an autonomous AGV cross.
We were looking for a technology provider that could help us to create a new technology demonstration about the 5G positioning in the industrial world... We find SMA-RTY a really great partner to work with. We really want to push forward the demonstration that we created together and have it as a living lab to further experiment.
— Giulio Centi, MADE Competence Center
Towards a Living Lab for the Industry
As highlighted in the video, the real innovation lies in using an open environment capable of generating huge amounts of data. By working on Data Fusion (merging multiple data points for reliable positioning), 5G-SHIELD moves beyond a simple Proof of Concept. It aims to become a living lab: an open environment where industrial partners can collaborate to establish a new safety standard for the factories of the future.
