Radio Frequency & Machine Vision Technologies

A single receiver channel can time-share across an entire array of antennas instead of requiring dedicated hardware per antenna – cutting the electronics cost of a positioning system dramatically while preserving the accuracy needed for real-time tracking. A refined “cycling reference” design later split this into a dedicated reference channel and a measurement channel, further improving precision.

Wireless relay stations let a positioning system add coverage and precision by introducing additional receive points that communicate wirelessly with a base station, without running new cable, and without the multipath penalty that a wired round-trip would introduce.

Phase-based positioning is inherently ambiguous. A phase measurement repeats every wavelength, so the same reading can correspond to multiple possible distances. Position Imaging’s signal-processing patents resolve this ambiguity and disambiguate between candidate solutions, a problem that has to be solved correctly for phase-based RF positioning to be usable at all.

Deploying an RF positioning system traditionally required precisely surveying every antenna’s location by hand. Position Imaging’s calibration patents let a receiver array determine its own antennas’ relative position automatically, from a tag walked to a handful of known reference points, cutting installation time from a specialized, hours-long process to a routine setup step.

A shelf-mounted camera with a field of view fixed on the shelf below it can detect, from image comparisons alone, whether an object has been placed, moved, or removed – and a co-located directional light source (laser or LED) can then guide a person’s hand to exactly the right spot, whether that’s a drop-off location or the item they’ve come to retrieve.

Weight sensors cross-check what the camera sees, flagging a mismatch between the expected and actual handling of an item, catching errors or improper removal that vision alone might miss. Continuous video monitoring adds a further layer, detecting rule-violating handling (a thrown package, the wrong item taken) and triggering real-time alerts.

The camera, depth sensor, and directional light live together in a single, rail-mountable module, engineered for fast retrofit into existing shelving, with a companion calibration technique that aims the light precisely at a target in one motion, without the trial-and-error most laser-guidance systems require.

A deep neural network identifies objects and reads their labels or barcodes automatically. When it fails to recognize something, the system asks a person once, then retains itself on that image, compounding accuracy over time across every deployed unit without manual retraining cycles.

The same underlying technology powers full package-management deployments: cameras and beam-break sensors (for thin items like envelopes that vision alone tends to miss) register drop-offs and pickups, notify recipients, and guide them to the correct location – deployable as a wall-mounted system or a free-standing kiosk with an integrated scanner.