GPS is everywhere, but it stops working the moment you go inside a building. Satellite signals don’t penetrate steel frames, concrete floors, or the RF noise of an active factory. For a warehouse trying to track 200 forklifts or a manufacturing plant wanting to know exactly where a tool trolley is, GPS is useless. For years the options were RFID zones (imprecise — you know something is in an area, not where), Bluetooth beacons (2 to 5 metre accuracy at best), or expensive proprietary systems.
Ultra-wideband changes the picture. UWB can achieve positioning accuracy of 10 to 30 centimetres in real-world industrial environments. That’s accurate enough to tell you not just which aisle a forklift is in, but whether it’s within 50cm of a pedestrian zone boundary. At that level of precision, new safety and operational applications become possible.
How UWB Actually Works
UWB is a radio technology that operates by sending extremely short pulses across a wide frequency band (3.1 to 10.6 GHz under IEEE 802.15.4a/z). The key to its accuracy is time-of-flight ranging. A UWB tag and anchor exchange these pulses and measure the time difference with nanosecond precision. Since radio signals travel at the speed of light, nanosecond timing translates to centimetre-level distance measurement.
In a real-time location system (RTLS), you deploy fixed anchor nodes across your facility. Tags on assets or people communicate with multiple anchors simultaneously. A server calculates position by trilateration — the same geometric principle as GPS, but with much shorter distances and much higher timing precision.
The technology isn’t new. Decawave (now part of Qorvo) pioneered commercial UWB modules with their DW1000 chip, launched around 2013. What’s changed is scale. Apple put UWB in iPhones from the 11 onwards, Samsung put it in Galaxy S20 flagships, NXP Trimension chips went into billions of devices. The component costs have dropped significantly, and the ecosystem of software, firmware, and integration partners has matured.
Industrial Use Cases That Work
Forklift collision avoidance. A UWB tag on each forklift and a tag on each pedestrian’s badge. The system calculates the distance between them in real time. Below a threshold, the forklift slows. Below a minimum safe distance, it stops. This is one of the most compelling safety applications and has been deployed in UK distribution centres by Jungheinrich, Crown, and Yale.
Tool and equipment tracking. A precision aerospace or automotive facility has thousands of calibrated tools that need to be in specific locations for specific tasks. UWB lets you track each tool case or trolley continuously, alert when something’s moved to the wrong zone, and prove to quality auditors that the right tools were used in the right place.
Worker safety in hazardous zones. In a chemical plant, certain areas require specific PPE or are completely off-limits to certain worker roles. UWB geofencing triggers alerts when an authorised worker enters an area without confirmed PPE, or when a non-authorised worker approaches a hazard zone.
Asset utilisation. Understanding that a piece of equipment is in a facility is different from knowing where it is and whether it’s being used. UWB combined with vibration sensors or power monitoring gives you a real picture of utilisation for expensive machinery.
Hardware Options in 2026
The dominant UWB chip for industrial RTLS applications is Qorvo’s DW3000 series (successor to the Decawave DW1000). It’s low-power, widely supported, and has a mature SDK. Most third-party anchor and tag hardware is built on Decawave/Qorvo silicon.
For enterprise deployments, complete RTLS systems come from Sewio, Pozyx, Zebra Technologies, and Ubisense. These include the anchor hardware, tag hardware, positioning server software, and integration APIs. They’re not cheap — expect £30 to £100 per tag depending on battery life and form factor, plus anchor infrastructure and software licences. For a medium-sized warehouse, total deployment cost typically runs from £50,000 to £200,000.
For smaller deployments or custom applications, development kits from Qorvo and Decawave let you build your own RTLS. The Raspberry Pi ecosystem has UWB HATs available, and there are ESP32 UWB modules for lower-cost experiments.
Integration with Industrial Platforms
UWB systems output location data — typically (x, y, z) coordinates plus timestamps — via a positioning server. Connecting that to your existing industrial infrastructure is where the real work happens.
Most RTLS platforms expose REST APIs or MQTT feeds that can connect to industrial IoT platforms. Location data flows into AWS Greengrass, Azure IoT Hub, or an on-premises SCADA system. From there it can trigger PLC actions, update ERP records, generate maintenance work orders, or feed into digital twin representations of the facility.
The integration point to think about carefully is latency. Forklift collision avoidance requires sub-100ms response from “tag too close to pedestrian” to “forklift receives stop command”. Most UWB RTLS systems can achieve update rates of 10 to 50 Hz, giving you 20 to 100ms of positional freshness. Whether that’s sufficient depends on the forklift’s speed and your safety margin definition — worth modelling before you commit to a supplier.
Power and Battery Life
UWB’s main downside for IoT is power consumption. Unlike BLE beacons that can run for years on a coin cell, a continuously transmitting UWB tag has a battery life measured in days to weeks. For applications where the tag is on something that’s regularly returned to base (forklifts, tool cases), this is manageable. For worker badges worn continuously, you need either a larger battery, frequent charging, or a hybrid approach where BLE is used for coarse presence detection and UWB is triggered only when fine-grained positioning is needed.
NXP’s Trimension NCJ29D5 and Qorvo’s DW3110 include power management modes that help significantly. Well-designed firmware with intelligent duty cycling can extend battery life to a month or more, depending on required update rate.