PRESS RELEASE: China Unicom Guangdong verified the effectiveness of Huawei’s 5G indoor positioning in the factory of Midea’s kitchen appliances division in the Shunde district of Foshan, a prefecture-level city in central Guangdong Province. They tested 5G positioning in one of the warehouses that house Midea’s finished products, finding a 1 m@90% precision in the warehouse areas. Precision has shown marked improvement since the last test in September 2021, and helps move the home appliance giant forward towards fully-connected 5G factories and end-to-end smart warehouses.

Logistics is core to smart factories, and positioning is key to keeping everything flowing smooth, be it machines, materials, or people. Efficient positioning has long been a major challenge for manufacturing vendors, who need to trace various elements of the logistics systems in real time. 5G excels in both positioning and connectivity, providing Midea with a new option for their smart warehousing systems.

This verification was based on Huawei’s LampSite Enterprise Edition (EE) solution which incorporates an optimized device-network coordinated positioning algorithm. This is the first time that indoor positioning has reached an accuracy of 1 m, and also the best performance the world has ever seen from 5G indoor networks.

“High-precision positioning is the key to smart warehousing and logistics,” commented Wang Jun, the chief architect of Midea’s Industrial Internet. “The verification demonstrated a location precision of 1 m, and this level of capability will help Midea introduce intelligence to distribution tractors and clamp trucks in its warehousing systems. The improvement in 5G positioning will no doubt lead to more innovative applications in our factory operations.”