A conversation between LocaXion CEO Viren Mathuria and Redpoint CEO Chunjie Duan on safety-grade RTLS, what genuine precision demands, and the architecture built for what’s coming.

VM: Chunjie, let me open with the question our clients ask us first and the one that shapes every safety engagement we take on. LocaXion is the world’s first pure-play RTLS and Digital Twin systems integrator. We are, by design and by principle, completely technology-agnostic. We have no commercial obligation to any hardware manufacturer. So when a safety-critical application is on the table when the stakes involve people, autonomous systems, and live warehouse and distribution center environments why does LocaXion select Redpoint?

CD: Because in safety-grade applications, technology independence and technology selection aren’t in conflict they’re the same discipline applied rigorously.

When the application involves people, the hardware decision isn’t a commercial conversation. It’s an engineering one. And the engineering answer, in any environment where the safety model depends on knowing where a human being or a moving vehicle is right now, to the centimeter, with latency low enough to be actionable is Ultra-Wideband. Not approximately. Not under ideal conditions. Consistently, in the most demanding warehouse and distribution center environments in operation today.

That’s the standard Redpoint was built to meet. Fifteen years of singular focus on that problem produces something categorically different from location technology that was designed for inventory visibility and retrofitted for safety. Those are incompatible design philosophies. A system built for visibility tells you where something approximately was, recently enough to be useful. A system built for safety tells you where a person is right now, with the precision and stability required for an automated response to fire before a consequence becomes possible.

LocaXion selects Redpoint because that distinction is not theoretical. In a safety context, it is the entire foundation.

VM: Let’s go somewhere the industry is actively avoiding. “Forklift safety” and “forklift tracking” are being spoken in the same breath… marketed as interchangeable, sold as equivalent. But they are not. Why is that conflation not just a messaging problem but a genuinely dangerous one?

CD: Because one tells you where a forklift went. The other stops it before it hits someone. Treating those as the same thing is how people get hurt.

Forklift tracking is a retrospective capability. It gives you data you can analyze after a shift, audit after an incident, or use to optimize routing over time. That has genuine operational value. But it has no business being positioned as a safety solution because safety, by definition, is a real-time intervention problem. The moment a pedestrian enters a blind intersection in a busy distribution center, the question isn’t “where was that forklift twenty seconds ago?” The question is “where is it right now, and what is the system doing about it?”

What Redpoint’s safety-grade RTLS actually delivers is a set of active, automated interventions that operate on live, precise location data. Forklifts slow down automatically in designated pedestrian zones. Not because a driver notices a sign, but because the system governs the speed directly. At high-traffic intersections, mandatory stops are enforced before the vehicle enters the crossing zone. In aisles where co-existence of foot traffic and powered equipment creates inherent risk, speed is governed continuously, dynamically, and without relying on human compliance.

That is a fundamentally different capability from knowing where the forklift was. And the vendors blurring that line, say, positioning tracking dashboards as safety infrastructure, are creating a false sense of protection in environments where the consequences of that illusion are serious. The distribution center that believes it has a safety solution because it has a tracking system is, in some ways, in a more dangerous position than the one that knows it doesn’t.

VM: And this problem gets significantly more complex in the modern DC because the forklift is no longer the only vehicle in the aisle. The mixed-fleet reality of forklifts operating alongside AGVs and AMRs creates an entirely new layer of proximity risk. How does Redpoint’s approach address that?

CD: This is where precision-grade ranging becomes the critical differentiator and where most existing safety approaches simply run out of architecture.

The mixed-fleet environment in a fast-moving distribution center or warehouse is genuinely complex. You have human-operated forklifts with variable behavior, AGVs following programmed paths, and AMRs navigating dynamically all sharing the same aisles, the same intersections, the same constrained spaces. The safety problem isn’t just human-to-vehicle proximity anymore. It’s vehicle-to-vehicle awareness across platforms that speak different languages and operate under entirely different control architectures.

Redpoint’s forklift-to-AGV and forklift-to-AMR ranging solution is specifically designed for this reality. It establishes direct, real-time proximity awareness between manned and autonomous vehicles … so a forklift operator approaching an AGV in a cross-aisle knows the system is managing that interaction, and the AGV’s control layer has the precise ranging data it needs to respond intelligently. The safety perimeter becomes dynamic across the entire mixed fleet, not just around the human.

In a high-velocity DC where throughput pressure is constant and the fleet is increasingly heterogeneous, that capability isn’t a future consideration. It’s a present operational requirement. And it can only be delivered reliably on a precision foundation that doesn’t compromise on latency or accuracy when the environment is at full operational intensity.

VM: For the operations leader in a distribution center or warehouse who understands the safety case but is carrying the organizational weight of making this investment what is the essential truth they need to own walking into that conversation?

CD: That the gap between “we have forklift tracking” and “our people are protected” is not a small one and that gap is where incidents live.

The DC environment is unforgiving. High throughput, compressed timelines, mixed fleets, and the constant co-existence of powered equipment and people create a proximity risk profile that is continuous and dynamic. Technology that was designed to answer “where did the forklift go?” cannot be the answer to “how do we make sure the forklift and the person never occupy the same space at the wrong moment.”

What Redpoint delivers and what LocaXion engineers into a complete, integrated safety architecture is the infrastructure that closes that gap. Forklift slowdowns. Mandatory intersection stops. Speed governance in designated zones. Real-time ranging across mixed fleets. These are active, automated safety outcomes, not reporting layers. They operate in the moment, without requiring human compliance or supervisory oversight to function.

The organizations that understand this distinction aren’t buying a safety system. They’re establishing the standard that every person walking into their facility deserves to be protected by. That’s the conversation worth having. And it starts by being honest about what tracking is and what it isn’t.

Redpoint is the premier safety-grade UWB RTLS hardware manufacturer. LocaXion is the world’s first pure-play RTLS & Digital Twin systems integrator engineering safety outcomes in warehouses and distribution centers with complete technology independence and zero compromise on precision.