Subject: [NEXTEL-1] WSJ.com - ABB's Wireless Technology Goes Beyond Mobile Phones

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Nov 2002 20:47:06 -0500

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB1037808251577606988-search,00.html?collection=wsjie%2F30day&vql_string=Radio+%3Cin%3E%28article%2Dbody%29

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ 

Search

Quotes & Research

Advanced Search

Symbol(s)

Name

As of 1:51 p.m. EST Friday, November 22, 2002

In Today's Paper

Columnists

Portfolio

Setup Center

Discussions

Site Map

Help

Contact Us

Today In:

BARRON'S Online

<a href="http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/interactive.wsj.com/technology_innovation;famil=technology;sz=120x600;ptile=1;ord=9083908390839083" target="_new"><img src="http://ad.doubleclick.net/ad/interactive.wsj.com/technology_innovation;famil=technology;sz=120x600;ptile=1;ord=9083908390839083" border=0 width=120 height=600 vspace="0" alt="Advertisement"></a><br clear=all>

@ Your Service

Give a perfect gift

The Online Journal

OPEN: The Small Business NetworkSM. Go!

Get 25 commission-free trades!

Trade 5 Free @ Lind-Waldock. Click Now!

IBM Fusion Webisodes

The Smart Marketing Report from DoubleClick

Transfer balances and save with a low 2.99% Intro APR*

SPECIAL REPORT: TECHNOLOGY INNOVATION

Start a FREE
trial of the
Online Journal

Subscribe to
The Print Journal

Free US Quotes:

Symbol

Name

Get FREE E-Mail by topic

Check Out our
Mobile & Wireless Services

DIGEST OF EARNINGS

Details of the latest corporate
earnings reported for FREE.

advertisement

<a href="http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/interactive.wsj.com/technology_innovation;famil=technology;sz=160x600;ptile=2;ord=9083908390839083" target="_new"><img src="http://ad.doubleclick.net/ad/interactive.wsj.com/technology_innovation;famil=technology;sz=160x600;ptile=2;ord=9083908390839083" border=0 width=160 height=600 vspace="0" alt="Advertisement"></a><br clear=all>

Personalized Home Page Setup

Put headlines on your homepage about the companies, industries and topics that interest you most.

FROM THE ARCHIVES: November 22, 2002

ABB's Wireless Technology

Goes Beyond Mobile Phones

By DAVID PRINGLE

Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET
JOURNAL

Call it the full monty for robots. On leave from its day job on a
car-assembly line, a bright-red robot performed a strip routine at a
technology fair in Hannover, Germany, earlier this year.

In front of a small crowd, the robot, nicknamed Robbie, carefully
removed a knot of cables that had been restricting its movement and then
spun a model car through 180 degrees, to demonstrate its new-found
dexterity.

Robbie's creator, Swiss engineering company ABB Ltd.
(www.abb.com), is aiming to usher in a new era for assembly-line robots, which
have typically been weighed down by the cables used to transmit information
about their performance to factory computers. Instead, Robbie is fitted
with wireless sensors that can send the performance data through the air
using radio waves.

These sensors are just one example of how wireless technology is moving
beyond mobile phones and into hidden corners of industry, transforming the
way factories and distribution chains operate. Radio
tags are already being
used to track the movement of beer kegs, and experts believe wireless chips
will be attached to billions of machines and objects over the next decade,
allowing computers to continually monitor their condition and location.

THE WIRELESS FUTURE

Join a
discussion: What are the biggest developments you are looking forward to in
wireless technology?

As well as helping industry to better manage assets, Lars Godell, an
analyst with Forrester Research in Amsterdam, says this invisible world of
wireless will open new business opportunities for semiconductor suppliers
and companies selling computers to handle all the data the wireless chips
will generate.

"For chip manufacturers and [computer] storage companies this is manna
from heaven," he says. But Mr. Godell acknowledges that a string of
technical hurdles, which have so far prevented wireless technology from
proliferating across industry, will have to be overcome first.

Set Him Free

Indeed, ABB engineers had to be very creative to set Robbie free of his
wires.

Work began in earnest in 1998, after ABB came to the conclusion that
wireless sensors would make assembly-line robots more reliable. "The
cabling represents the dominant cause of failure and, thereby, downtime of
conventional systems," says Snorre Kjesbu, ABB's technology program manager
for wireless communication.

The biggest problem facing Mr. Kjesbu and his fellow researchers wasn't
sending information through the air, but creating a wireless power supply.
After all, a sensor attached to an electrical cable could hardly be
described as "wireless."

With that in mind, ABB's engineers in Switzerland set about designing a
sensor that could operate using a fraction of the power of its
predecessors. They configured their sensors to send out data only when a
change occurred in the state of the machine they were monitoring, rather
than supplying a continuous flow of information.

But even these frugal sensors would still need some kind of wireless
power source. Mr. Kjesbu traveled from his base in Norway to Germany in the
summer of 1998 to team up with ABB's power-supply specialists. Batteries
were quickly rejected, as they couldn't provide the 10 years of
maintenance-free operation ABB's engineers were shooting for. "We said:
'You can't send a big guy with greasy gloves into the plant to change the
batteries every week,' " recalls Mr. Kjesbu. Fuel cells and solar
panels were similarly discarded as impractical.

Power for Light Bulbs

Ultimately, they decided to supply the sensors with power using a
magnetic field, created by looping a series of electricity cables around
the perimeter of the manufacturing site. Tiny coils were placed within the
sensors to pick up energy from the field and convert it into electrical
power. In ABB's labs in Germany, the engineers soon had a test system up
and running, wirelessly powering light bulbs placed in the middle of the
field.

But it was too soon to celebrate. The engineers discovered that if any
metal plates on the production line moved into a position perpendicular to
the magnetic field, the whole field would cut out. After racking their
brains, one of the team came up with a simple solution. If they rotated the
field, any metal objects couldn't block its operation.

By comparison, providing a wireless link between the sensor and the
factory's computers proved fairly straightforward. In essence, the
engineers based their system on the short-range wireless LAN, or local area
network, technology widely used to connect computers, printers, personal
organizers and other consumer gizmos. However, they adapted the technology
so the system could transmit information in two directions at once and
monitor thousands of sensors in tandem. To keep the cost down, ABB used
Bluetooth radio receivers in the sensors, which are already mass-produced
for use in mobile phones.

By the autumn of 1999, the ABB engineers had their first prototype. "It
was the size of a shoebox -- and a pretty big shoebox," says Mr. Kjesbu.
But it was enough to prove to ABB's top managers that a commercial product
was possible. The company's engineers spent the next two years whittling
the wireless sensor down to the size of a matchbox. Following Robbie's
outing in Hannover earlier this year, the company plans to begin selling
the wireless sensors commercially from the second quarter of 2003.

ABB's rivals also have wireless sensors in the works. Honeywell International Inc. of
Morristown, New Jersey, is developing such gizmos for both the automotive
and health-care industries. In line with the old adage that prevention is
better than cure, Honeywell is working on wireless sensors that could be
embedded into the human body to help spot potential health problems before
they develop. However, Frank Turnbull, the global-technology leader in
Honeywell's sensor and control business, cautions that this work is still
in the very early stages of development.

More advanced is the development of wireless sensors to monitor the
performance of individual components of cars, particularly moving parts
that can't easily be fitted with cables.

Wireless sensors could be built into the key components of a car as they
are manufactured, says Mr. Turnbull. "It is a major advantage never to see
it again," he adds. "The secret of true wireless is fit and forget."

Honeywell plans to sell its first wireless sensors to the automotive
industry in 2004, but the company says it will likely be 2005 before they
are capable of monitoring wheels or other parts that are constantly in
motion. "It is difficult to make connectivity with anything rotating, like
a wheel," says Mr. Turnbull.

Honeywell is designing its wireless sensors so that they oscillate when
they are bombarded with a particular type of radio wave. The frequency at
which they oscillate would yield information about the pressure or torque
of the component the sensor is monitoring.

One of the most taxing problems is building sensors that are sensitive
enough so that they only respond to the right radio waves and aren't
confused by other emissions from the car. "In this respect, the automotive
environment is the worst environment you can imagine," says Mr.
Turnbull.

More rudimentary wireless tags are already being used in parts of the
consumer-goods industry. These tags typically contain a radio chip based on
a technology known as RFID, or radio frequency identification, that can
transmit information over distances of up to 150 centimeters.
Edinburgh-based brewer Scottish
& Newcastle PLC has been using RFID tags for more than three
years to help it keep track of 1.9 million beer kegs.

The tags, essentially small radios encased in black plastic for
protection, contain information about what is in the beer keg, when it was
filled and the keg's next destination. RFID tags can hold far more
information than the bar codes that have long been used to do this job. The
data in the tags can be extracted or updated wirelessly from a distance of
25 centimeters using a handheld reader. The tags don't have batteries,
relying instead on magnetic waves generated by the handheld reader to
transmit information.

Thanks to this system, David Brown, brewing-operations director for
Scottish Courage, a division of Scottish & Newcastle, says the company
now rarely loses beer kegs, saving it millions of pounds a year. Each keg,
typically made of steel, costs £50 (€78), while the tags
cost between £2 and £3 each. Mr. Brown says the tags
are also a source of useful information about beer sales. "When you get
them back from the pub, you can tell how long the keg has been in there,
and how fresh the beer was," he adds.

Scottish & Newcastle's tags are high-end models designed to
withstand the rough treatment handed out to beer kegs. Less-robust RFID
chips can be bought for as little as 20 European cents.

But companies may also need to beef up their computer systems to handle
the data generated by the tags. For now, Forrester Research says it is only
cost-effective to attach these devices to items with a long life span or a
high-ticket price. "Today, RFID makes sense for reusable assets like
pallets, beer kegs and plastic crates, not individual goods," says
Forrester analyst Christine Spivey Overby. But the research firm says new
production techniques will soon push the cost of these tags down toward
five cents, and it forecasts that five billion objects will be covered by
RFID systems by 2005. Mr. Godell expects RFID to be the most widely
deployed short-range wireless technology, followed by Bluetooth and
WLAN.

See how
wireless sensors work on a production line

Eventually, every item containing a semiconductor may have a means to
communicate as a matter of course. Intel Corp., the world's largest
chip maker, has embarked on a long-term project to add a radio to every
chip it produces.

Although this kind of embedded wireless technology should help Intel and
others sell more chips, it isn't clear whether it will rekindle growth in
the mobile-phone industry. Deloitte Consulting, pointing out that machines
outnumber humans by 4 to 1, believes that machine-to-machine communication
could be a vast new market for mobile-phone operators. But that might
depend on operators offering machines cut-price tariffs. If not, much of
the data generated by wireless sensors is likely to travel just a few yards
through the air using unlicensed spectrum, rather than commercial
mobile-phone networks, before being piped through fixed networks to
corporate databases.

Still, there are companies building machines designed specifically for
use with mobile-phone networks. Nokia Corp., the world's largest
handset maker, plans to launch an "observation camera" with a built-in
mobile network connection in the second quarter of 2003. Nokia envisages
that users will position the camera in a room they wish to monitor, such as
a kitchen with a pet dog in it. They will then be able to use their mobile
phone to send a text message to the camera requesting it take a picture.
The camera will then send the photo back to the user's handset.

Nokia says the observation camera can also be configured to send a
picture when it detects motion or at regular intervals. It is also designed
to record sounds or take the temperature of its surroundings. "You could,
for example, check the weather at the golf course before leaving home to
play," says Janne Jormalainen, vice president of Nokia's mobile
enhancements business unit.

Cutting the Cord

How Wireless Sensors Work on a Production Line

When the power supply (1) is switched on, four cables (2) looped around the manufacturing cell create a magnetic
field. The wireless sensors (3) pick up energy from the magnetic field and use it to
produce radio waves. that can transmit information about the robot
(4) and the assembly line (5) to antennas (6) mounted on the wall. That information can then be
viewed on a computer screen (7).

Write to David Pringle at
[email-masked]

Updated November 22, 2002 1:51 p.m. EST

');
document.write(''); //-->

REPRINTS INFORMATION:
To distribute multiple copies of this article, visit the Dow Jones Reprints site.

Return To Top

Corrections
Contact Us
Help
About Dow Jones
Mobile Devices

Account Information
Privacy Policy
Subscriber Agreement

Copyright © 2002    Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
All Rights Reserved

Copyright and reprint information