Looking three to five years ahead and being ahead of the technological curve is a key part of Energous’ strategy, Giampaolo Marino, SVP of Strategy and Business Development, told IoT Insider in an interview that covered ambient IoT, infrastructure, and energy harvesting.
Energous is a 12-year-old wireless power provider that pivoted its focus to ambient IoT some years ago. This was helped by a partnership with Wiliot announced in 2021, where Energous’ WattUp 1W energy harvesting technology was chosen to power Wiliot’s IoT Pixel tags in select deployments.
Energous has two core product offerings: its RF-based wireless network infrastructure and its new battery-free e-Sense tag, which harvests energy from its RF network.
Ambient IoT uses energy harvested from the environment – such as light, Wi-Fi, RF or vibrations – to power and connect a network of sensors, and its ability to continuously and autonomously track assets as they move from location to location means retail giants in the US are paying attention to ambient IoT.
Although RFID uses radio waves to identify and track objects and is frequently used for asset monitoring, Marino said that the key differentiator between the two technologies was ambient IoT’s ability to operate autonomously.
“It’s always collecting data and it’s always communicating data back to the Cloud, without any source of manual intervention,” he said. “This is really the fundamental shift that is enabling a lot of the retailers to boost operational efficiency and cut costs. And the way we say [it] is, ‘turn on the light in the supply chain’.” This refers to ambient IoT’s capabilities to metaphorically shine a bright torch on every aspect of the supply chain by providing continuous information about assets.
A conversation with Wiliot where they were keen not to disparage RFID or position it as a competing technology, but a complementary one, raised the same question with Marino: does he think RFID and ambient IoT are competitors?
“I think RFID sets the base for supply chain visibility,” Marino said. “What ambient IoT does [is] add intelligence to what is already existing and provided by RFID … to me, the two technologies need to coexist. So it’s not that one will cannibalise the other or one will compete against the other.”
As an example of what that intelligence can look like, ambient IoT tags that are monitoring pallets of food being transported from the warehouse to the supermarket provide constant readings on the temperatures during the journey.
And if an asset gets diverted – as can frequently happen in logistics where deliveries of food are loaded onto the wrong truck and subsequently sent to the wrong supermarket – companies can look at the detailed data provided by ambient IoT to understand what went wrong, or even proactively prevent it from happening in real time.
Wireless power network infrastructure
Ambient IoT tags harvest energy from their surrounding environment to be able to send enough data to the Cloud to be analysed. The amount of energy provided is essential as it dictates just how much data can be sent.
Typically, gateways bridge the gap between energy harvesting devices and the network.
However, Energous’ wireless power network provides an alternative, offering its customers scalability as they don’t need to depend on buying a fixed number of gateways to cover their warehouse or other large-scale environment. They can instead use the network, which will utilise Power over Internet or existing infrastructure to push data.
“In a warehouse that is about a million square metres, you’d probably need anywhere between 350 to 500 transmitters to be able to energise the whole warehouse,” said Marino. “With millions of BLE tags, now we have scale.”
The network itself has been around for 12 years – since the company was established – but since it began focusing on ambient IoT infrastructure, it has become a key technology enabler.
Marino likened it to Wi-Fi’s evolution: “[With Wi-Fi] we went from cable Internet to … Wi-Fi everywhere. We’re essentially doing the same. We’re going to go from cable power to power everywhere with Energous’ solution.”
The network has regulatory approval in over 114 countries to date.
Cold chain is an important application Energous are looking at, because it depends on consistent temperatures to transport sensitive products like pharmaceuticals and vaccines, and sorely needs the intelligence ambient IoT gives.
It’s also working with large logistics companies to be able to track their assets across the entire supply chain, and companies that are having issues with product diversion where high-value items like smartphones disappear somewhere in the supply chain.
“To be able to tag those assets across their entire operation and always have a pulse on how that asset is moving and if it’s disappearing, they know exactly where it disappeared,” said Marino. “There’s a lot of product diversion that is happening … that they’re trying to overcome. And I think this technology becomes … handy for them.”
Battery-free tags
Recently Energous introduced its own battery-free e-Sense tags to target location and temperature monitoring for retail, cold chain, and logistics applications. The tags use energy harvested from its wireless power network with a 4x5cm form factor and supports multiple sensor modalities, such as temperature, humidity, CO₂, and light.
Marino noted that with the introduction of the e-Sense tags, they’re not looking to compete with Wiliot’s tags, which they will continue supporting with their network.
“There are two major differences,” said Marino. “The first one is price: Wiliot is a sub-20-cents label which typically gets applied on every single product … Energous’ e-Sense tag is more expensive, it resells for about $5.” That means that the e-Sense tag is intended for larger assets like pallets or containers.
The second difference relates to e-Sense tags’ integrated temperature sensor and its distinct approach to capturing temperature data within a cold chain environment.
For example, when tagging food, rather than having to use 100 item tags to report temperature, an e-Sense tag fixed to a pallet can act as the control unit which the customer can use to measure the standard of deviation.
Besides targeting higher price points and more accurate temperature sensors, there were two other factors behind Energous’ decision to launch this tag: the goal of eliminating batteries out of sensors altogether and eliminating the need to maintain batteries.
The point at which batteries can decay varies and the unpredictability behind this drives up the costs of maintenance, Marino explained.
“These fundamental constraints are what is limiting sensors to reach … billions of units. And so eliminating … these two barriers, we believe we can push the cost of sensors lower and [enable] customers to adopt more sensors for their operation.”
Ambient IoT is expected to grow
Marino described his own “bullish” belief that ambient IoT will grow, looking three to five years in the future, enabled by wireless power and Edge computing.
There could be the integration of complementary technologies like Wi-Fi to reduce the total cost of ownership for end users. He mentioned that Energous wasn’t going to become a Wi-Fi provider per se, or necessarily integrate Wi-Fi into their network, but that “level of consolidation” with technologies was going to happen.
“We’ve seen that every single time when technology starts to reach maturity and growth,” he concluded.
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