An Evaluation of Low-Cost Self-Localization Service Exploiting Angle of Arrival for Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems

During the last years, the industrial automation field was radically revolutionized by Industry 4.0 paradigm. The possibility to interconnect industrial machinery to the cyber world through Cyber Physical System (CPS) enables innovative services, but open new challenges on communication and data management sides. In fact, it is important to identify not only which CPS generated an information, but also where it is located on the production plant, since the configuration of the automation could dynamically change in function of the product being produced. In our research work, a low-cost (and low power) approach for the estimation of the relative position of CPS in industrial plant has been investigated. The proposed solution exploits the Direction Finding service introduced by Bluetooth 5.0. The Angle of Arrival (AoA) method in connection-less mode is used to estimate the angle between a tag and the receiving anchors. In this way, the computational power (and, the relative power consumption) of the tag is limited. The preliminary characterization of this solution shows as the maximum error angle is about 5° at a distance of 4 m between anchor and tag. This result is promising, although the application of the BLE Direction Finding service requires a careful design of the array of antennas and of its radiation pattern to allow a proper localization in the three-dimensional space.