System reveals what's where

Paul Winton

If you've ever wanted to know how footballers move about the field during a game, where your luggage is at the airport, or if prison inmates are gathering for a riot, then Paric may have the technology for you.

The Auckland-based company's positioning system works by attaching radio-transmitting tags to individuals or items. The tags emit a simple radio frequency pulse - similar to that found in a car alarm keyring - that receivers locate. The system then tracks positions, accurate to within half a centimetre, and produces a continuous picture of the movement of the tagged individuals or items.

It's a system, says Paric co-founder Paul Winton, that can be used in a variety of situations, including football games, airports and prisons.

The company was founded in 2001, born out of Winton's Auckland University PhD in manufacturing engineering. The university holds the patent to the technology and Paric has global licensing rights. The Foundation for Research, Science and Technology has agreed to a $300,000 investment in Paric to help develop its navigation technology.

Winton says the company is now working with an Indian firm on a system for monitoring children in shopping malls. Children would wear watch-like devices and roam freely, with parents able to check their exact location at any time.

Winton says Paric has also been approached by a F1 team about monitoring racing cars. There has been a "huge amount of interest" in monitoring sports professionals, he says.

Paric's positioning system can also be applied to other fields, including robotics, he says.

"They [researchers] want to figure out whether or not the path the robot thinks it took was the same as the path it actually took," he says. "At the moment they have to do that with a tape measure."

However, Paric's main focus thus far is in research and development, and the commercial materials handling sector. Paric sold its system earlier this year to the University of Bremen in Germany for commercial logistics technology research.

The logistics area, Winton says, lends itself well to Paric's technology.

"Huge amounts of time are spent moving goods around," he says. "Our technology means you will be able to identify exactly where an item or a pallet is and automate a forklift to pick it up at the right time and deliver it to the next destination."

He says automated vehicles currently follow buried cables - cost effective but inflexible - or they use optical laser guidance - flexible but not always cost effective.

Paric's transmitting tags can be fitted as needed, but the trick is to work around all the small location issues that arise. One problem, Winton says, is that a building's walls can expand and contract depending on temperature, so the challenge is to compensate for the resulting movement of receivers, which can shift by several millimeters.

Interference with the radio signal is another challenge.

"We need to develop technologies which ensure that your forklift doesn't come to a grinding halt because somebody's just turned their radio on."

The algorithms behind Paric's technology are designed to extract the "clean" signal from all the surrounding "noise".

"In the same way you get light reflections, you get radio frequency reflections ... it bounces off walls, cars or off ceilings and then ends up at the receiver."

Winton says the company is looking for investors to develop the sales and marketing resources needed for the next stage of commercialisation, to plant "some seeds in some of those emerging markets to better understand how we can position ourselves to capture a slice of the pie".

* Who: Co-founder Paul Winton
* Where: Auckland.
* What: Real-time positioning technology.
* Why: "I don't think there is anything more difficult and exciting than taking cutting-edge technology into an emerging market space from a New Zealand base."