What if you could localize and orient vehicles with high precision — without installing a single anchor, gateway, or reader?
This article introduces a new class of RTLS powered by vision-based SLAM from Slamcore and explores how it connects seamlessly into broader location-aware systems using Flowcate’s DeepHub®.
Rethinking RTLS: Why Scalable Location Tracking Remains a Challenge
Location data is one of the most powerful assets in modern intralogistics. From tracking materials and orchestrating fleets to automating safety zones and optimizing layouts — real-time visibility is the foundation for smarter and safer operations.
Over the years, technologies like RFID, BLE, WiFi, and UWB have made this visibility possible in many environments. Each of them has its place and strengths — and they are actively being used across the industry today.
However, when it comes to scaling these technologies across large facilities, or multiple sites, many companies hit a wall. The infrastructure costs for anchors, gateways, cabling, or readers — combined with setup complexity and integration overhead — can become major roadblocks.
That’s why many RTLS deployments stay confined to pilot zones or critical areas, rather than reaching full operational scale.
A New Category of RTLS: Spatial Intelligence Without the Infrastructure
What if you could achieve precise location tracking — without installing any infrastructure? That’s the promise of vision-based RTLS.
This new approach puts spatial intelligence on the moving vehicle itself. Equipped with low cost cameras and inertial sensors, the system uses visual-inertial SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) to understand where the vehicle is, where it’s headed, and what surrounds it — all in real time.
It works by identifying thousands of naturally occurring visual features in the environment, from the corner of a shelf to a small mark on the floor. As the forklift moves, it builds and updates a 3D map of all of these features, whilst simultaneously calculating the position of the sensors within this map. It continuously refines its position and orientation — even in changing environments or poorly lit areas.
The benefits are clear:
✅ No fixed infrastructure
🕒 Rapid deployment — entire facilities can be set up in under an hour
🎯 Precise 3D positioning — accurate within 20 cm, including full XYZ coordinates
🧭 Real-time orientation tracking — know not just where an asset is, but exactly which way it’s facing
🧠 Object detection — identifies and locates people, pallets, vehicles for enhanced safety
🔁 Indoor and outdoor capability — robust performance across changing conditions
But beyond the technical specs, what’s transformative here is the accessibility. Without installation hurdles or system downtime, this kind of RTLS can finally scale — making real-time spatial data available to companies of any size, across any number of sites.
Meet Slamcore: Vision-Based RTLS for the Real World
One of the driving forces behind this new category is Slamcore — a company born from world-leading academic research in visual SLAM and now focused on solving real-world logistics challenges.
Their flagship product, Slamcore Aware, is a rugged, retrofittable module that brings visual-inertial RTLS and object detection to manually operated industrial vehicles. It comes preloaded with Slamcore’s proprietary SLAM AI, runs on NVIDIA Jetson compute hardware, and includes a calibrated stereo camera module with a wide field of view.
Slamcore Aware can be installed on any forklift — regardless of manufacturer — and connects via WiFi or Ethernet to a browser-based interface for setup and monitoring. No external control units or remote servers are needed, and no fixed infrastructure has to be deployed.
What sets Slamcore apart is not just the robustness of their SLAM engine, but also their deep focus on real-world industrial use cases:
• Designed for indoor and outdoor use
• Resilient to lighting or structural changes, vibrations, and shocks
• Supports multi-vehicle mapping and shared localization
• Built with an IP65-rated enclosure for harsh environments
It’s already being used by some of the largest OEMs and logistics providers globally — quietly replacing infrastructure-heavy systems and offering a smarter way to track, detect, and orchestrate movement inside the warehouse.
Slamcore + Flowcate: From Location Data to Business Impact
Capturing rich spatial data is only the first step. Making that data usable — across systems, teams, and workflows — is where the real value emerges.
This is where Flowcate’s DeepHub® comes into play. As the middleware layer between positioning technologies and enterprise systems, DeepHub acts as a central location data hub. It ingests raw location data, translates it into standardized coordinates, and routes it to connected applications like WMS, ERP, or fleet orchestration engines.
When Slamcore Aware connects to DeepHub, it becomes fully interoperable with the wider system landscape. The data is normalized and treated like any other RTLS input — enabling fast integration, faster decision-making, and faster time to value.
Whether the goal is to enable dynamic safety zones, automate workflows, or simply understand how assets move in real time — this partnership makes it seamless.
One Ecosystem. Many Technologies. Zero Lock-In.
As promising as vision-based RTLS is, there is no one-size-fits-all solution in intralogistics. In many environments, different technologies coexist. Some sites already have UWB infrastructure installed. Others rely on RFID for specific zones. Some AGVs may use their own native SLAM. That’s why openness and interoperability matter more than ever.
Flowcate is one of the founding members of omlox, the open locating standard that enables different positioning technologies — from vision to UWB, BLE, and GPS — to speak the same language. It allows businesses to choose the right technology for each application, while managing everything through a unified interface.
With DeepHub and omlox, Slamcore’s tech doesn’t replace others — it complements them. Together, they enable a modular, future-proof architecture that scales across use cases, sites, and vendors.
Vision-Based RTLS: A Smarter Path to Real-Time Operations
Infrastructure-free RTLS is more than just a new tool — it’s a step-change in how companies can approach visibility, safety, and automation.
By combining Slamcore’s cutting-edge spatial intelligence with Flowcate’s seamless data integration layer, businesses can finally scale location-aware operations without the infrastructure burden.
Ready to unlock the power of vision-based RTLS in your warehouse or factory? Let’s talk.