Lessons from the Field: 5G Private Cellular For Industrial Mobile Robotics

By: Gary Hill - Chief Innovation Officer, Future Technologies Venture, LLC

The Right Network for the Use Case?

Future Technologies has been demonstrating a number of industrial use cases in our Living Lab over the past three years.? These industrial use cases leverage wireless connectivity ranging from private cellular, public cellular, WiFi and LoRaWAN.? Selecting the most appropriate wireless network for each use case is driven by many factors such as data volume, latency, coverage area, device density, spectrum availability, resiliency and uptime, power consumption, device ecosystem and cyber security requirements.??

Mobile Robotics on the Rise?

Mobile robotics use cases are on the rise across manufacturing, warehousing and logistics areas as industrial customers continue their digital transformation journey by optimizing and automating their operations.? Some of the specific applications of mobile robots include: raw materials and parts delivery to the production line, movement of finished goods from the production line to warehouse inventory, movement of inventory to shipment/logistics and inspection of operational areas for safety and security.? These use cases are often considered mission critical as they are vital in delivering the optimized production and logistics goals of the business.?

The Challenges of WiFi for Mobile Robotics?

When it comes to the wireless networks supporting these mobile robotics use cases, the industry standard has been WiFi up to this point.? Due to the technical characteristics of WiFi it often falls short of meeting robotic vendor and customer expectations in these industrial settings, especially in larger coverage scenarios where many robots are roaming across the various operational areas.? Dropped connections, insufficient coverage, wireless interference and saturation of access points are some of the common issues that occur in large scale production environments.???

5G Private Cellular – A Better Way Forward?

Future Technologies has been testing 5G private cellular technology for mobile robotics in our Living Lab for three years. Recently, the company completed installation of one of the largest indoor 5G private cellular networks for mobile robotics in the automotive industry.? In phase one, the customer successfully deployed several hundred AMRs and AGVs within a ~750K square foot assembly area, using the mobile robots for moving parts to the assembly line and then moving finished vehicles to the inspection/test area of the facility.? The next phase will increase the total square footage to ~1.5M square feet and triple the number of AMRs and AGVs.?

Key requirements for the dedicated robotics 5G private cellular network included:???

• low latency connections with high UL data rates?

• ability to cover large areas (initially ~750K, increasing to ~1.5M square feet)?

• seamless handovers between the production areas with no drops?

• handle the high density of hundreds of robots, sometimes close together during charging periods??

• high availability with minimal downtime?

In Conclusion?

Our Living Lab and real-world customer deployment experiences have clearly demonstrated that 5G private cellular wireless provides a more robust and reliable network for these mission critical mobile robotics use cases and resolves the issues typically seen when using WiFi.? As with any use case, we start the conversation with our customers focused on their business and technology requirements to ensure we design the right network to meet their current and future needs. Reach out to Future Technologies if you’re Interested in learning more about the benefits of 5G private cellular networks for mobile robotics use cases.? You can also request a virtual tour of our Living Lab and see real-world industrial use cases and wireless networks.

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