Position determination is increasingly important for both commercial and personal applications. Real-time locating systems (RTLS) are used and relied upon for tracking objects, such as determining the location of an object within storage, shipping, retail, and/or manufacturing situations. Wireless transmitters or tags are commonly attached to or embedded in objects to provide wireless position determination signals to one or more wireless receivers or readers. Information about and/or from the wireless position determination signals can be used to determine a location of the object.
Many traditional and more recently developed real-time locating systems are typically challenged by similar problems, including available power, signal strength, interference, and available bandwidth. Generally, increased reliability of the wireless position determination signal from an object tag to a receiver will result in increased accuracy in the information that is available to determine the position of the object. One way to increase the reliability of the wireless position determination signal is to increase the bandwidth of the signal. However, increasing the bandwidth of the signal requires more energy (e.g., battery power), requires that the increased bandwidth be available for use, and typically causes increased interference problems. Many real-time locating systems are also challenged by infrastructure costs. Improving position determination typically has a corresponding cost increase, such as to increase the number of receivers or to use more robust object tags.
Numerous technologies are available to implement different real-time locating systems corresponding to the relevant application of the technology and desired results. And significant improvements have been made to various technologies that can be used for real-time locating systems. However, even in view of available technologies and improvements, it is still desirable to improve upon these existing techniques to address remaining limitations of the various technologies and to provide alternate technologies that may be preferred in certain instances. For example, there is a need in the art for improved architectures, systems, methods, and computer program products for real-time object locating and position determination that decrease and/or avoid problems of existing technologies. Similarly, for example, there is a need in the art for alternate technologies for real-time object locating and position determination that may be preferred in certain instances.