Automatic Pet Door & Tracking System

Households often need to provide pets access to outdoor spaces for play or relief without requiring a human to manually open the door, while ensuring security so that nothing other than the pets can enter.

This automatic pet door and tracking system leverages our proximity-based Wireless Ranging (WiRa™) technology to determine the pet's location relative to the door. Using the ranging signal transmission between the peer devices on the tag (inserted into the pet's collar) and the pet door, the system detects proximity and automatically opens the door to let the pet in or out.

Beyond functioning within the smart home ecosystem, this system extends overall pet care and tracking. When pets move beyond WiRa range—such as escaping past a fence—an alert is sent to the owner. The Bluetooth^® Low Energy (LE) tag on the collar then seamlessly switches to crowdsourced location (CSL) to track the pet and reduce the risk of prolonged loss or harm.

System Benefits:

• Integrated dual-location technologies provide robust, high-accuracy tracking and performance within a connected home space for letting pets in and out, while providing safeguards for global locationing if pets are lost or outside of the house.
• Small form factor and low-power tags fit easily into pet collars and extend operational battery time and prolonged findability.
• NFC enables quick pairing between tags and doors for easy setup, as well as charging capability for spare tags stored in the door socket for easy swapping and replacement of tags.
• Versatile HMI options include tactile or capacitive touch interfaces and integrated LED drivers for enhanced user experience, while consolidating BOM for cost efficiency and a cleaner form factor.
• Wi-Fi and Bluetooth LE connectivity enable smart home integration, mobile app control, customization and updates of the system.
• Mixed-signal ICs integrate voltage step-up and motor control for opening and closing the pet door (or lock), ensuring a compact BOM and reliable performance.