FAQs
Your questions, answered clearly.
Everything you need to know about DeepHub®, omlox, locating technology, and how to get started – answered directly and succinctly.
Basics & Terms
DeepHub® is the open operational and interoperability layer where intelligent systems understand and act on the physical world – vendor-neutral, across all locating technologies. It aggregates, harmonizes, and prepares location data from any source into one unified spatial model, accessible through one open API. Built by the team that invented the omlox hub, DeepHub is the first omlox-certified hub.
If you arrived here searching for RTLS middleware: DeepHub sits where a middleware would – but instead of just passing data through, it turns raw position events into a living spatial model that systems like MES, WMS, or AGV control can reason over and act on.
→ Explore DeepHub®
omlox is the world’s first open locating standard. It defines how locating technologies from different vendors – UWB, RFID, BLE, GPS, and others – exchange position data in a unified way, so companies can combine hardware freely instead of being locked into one ecosystem. omlox is hosted by PI, the largest association for industrial automation. Flowcate co-initiated the standard, invented the omlox hub, and donated the API spec to PI.
→ About the omlox standard
An RTLS determines the position of assets, vehicles, or people in real time, typically indoors, using technologies such as UWB, BLE, RFID, or optical systems. Each technology has different strengths in accuracy, range, and cost – there is no silver bullet in locating. That is why most operations end up combining several technologies, and why an open layer that unifies their data matters more than any single one of them.
→ Learn more on our blog
Physical AI describes AI systems that understand and act on the physical world – not just on text or images. On a shopfloor, that means software that knows where everything is, how it moves, and what to do about it: rebalancing a zone, rerouting a vehicle, booking a resource. Physical AI needs a spatial foundation – a live, unified model of the physical space. Building that foundation is what Flowcate does.
Spatial AI agents are software agents that reason over a live spatial model and act on it – without a human watching a dashboard and triggering each step. If it only shows, alerts, or reports, it is not an agent. Flowcate has been building AI-driven location services since 2002; spatial AI agents are the next stage of that work.
Technology & Integration
DeepHub® is vendor-neutral by design. It aggregates location data from any locating technology – UWB, BLE, RFID, Wi-Fi, GPS/GNSS, 5G, lidar, and camera-based systems – through omlox-based connectors, regardless of vendor. One API, one spatial model.
Target systems connect through DeepHub®’s open omlox API: they subscribe to location and geofence events instead of integrating each locating technology separately. One integration replaces many.
→ Blog: Making SAP Smarter
All three. DeepHub® ships as containers and runs wherever your architecture needs it – at the edge next to the shopfloor, in your data center, or in the cloud.
→ Documentation
Yes. For DeepHub®, camera-based positioning is one source among many – its data flows into the same spatial model as UWB, RFID, or BLE. You don’t have to choose between vision and radio-based locating; aggregation beats substitution.
Vendor Neutrality & Lock-In
Yes – that is precisely what DeepHub® is for. Hardware from different vendors feeds into one spatial model through omlox-based connectors: UWB from one vendor, BLE from another, RFID gates from a third. Mixed environments are the norm in real operations, not the exception – DeepHub makes them behave like one system.
Your integrations survive. Because MES, WMS, and other target systems connect to DeepHub®’s API – not to any vendor’s proprietary system – you can swap or add locating hardware without touching those integrations. Replace the hardware, keep the spatial model, keep everything built on it.
Locating projects rarely fail at accuracy – they fail when operations grow or change. Locked into one vendor’s ecosystem, every extension means re-integration, every price negotiation starts from weakness, and every new use case is limited to what that vendor offers. A vendor-neutral layer keeps every option open: the best technology per area, freely combined, exchangeable over time.
Getting Started & Company
Request a trial license through our contact form. DeepHub® ships as containers, the documentation is public, and example integrations are on GitHub – so your team can evaluate it in your own environment.
→ Request a trial license
Both paths work. Most locating solutions are delivered by our partner ecosystem – system integrators who build on DeepHub®, hardware vendors with certified connectors, and software providers with DeepHub-ready products. Talk to us either way: we’ll connect you with the right setup for your project.
→ Partner Ecosystem
The software is the fast part: DeepHub® runs in containers and is up in hours. Overall project time is driven by hardware installation and target-system integration – and varies with the size and complexity of your site. A trial in your own environment is the quickest way to a realistic estimate.
Flowcate GmbH is a software company based in Heidelberg, Germany, with a North American base in Vancouver, Canada. Our roots go back to a geoinformatics research group founded in 1998; since 2022 we operate as an independent company. We build DeepHub® and lead the omlox standard – the open foundation intelligent systems use to understand and act on the physical world.
→ Our story
Flowcate co-initiated omlox, invented the omlox hub and the industrial location data model, and donated the API spec to PI so that no single company owns the standard. Today we lead the omlox hub development and contribute to the omlox safety working group – and locating systems from various vendors become omlox-capable through DeepHub® connectors.