Vodafone Germany recently announced a collaboration with BMW and Nokia to trial a new 5G indoor positioning system at BMW’s Leipzig smart factory. The system is to be deployed over an area measuring 4500 square meters, mainly in the assembly hall and the logistics centre. The vision is for machines, tools, cars, and spare parts to be constantly tracked to high centimeteraccuracy to optimize processes and improve security. Until now, a number of different positioning systems were in use across the factory, mainly Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), WiFi, io-frequency identification (RFID) and iBeacon. While the precision for those systems in this particular factory was not revealed by BMW or Vodafone, a 2019 report places BLE tech in the 1-2 meter…