5G Swarm Production: Advanced Industrial Manufacturing Concepts enabled by Wireless Automation

This paper presents an overview of current Industry 4.0 applied research topics, addressed from both an industrial production and a wireless communication points of view. A roadmap towards achieving the more advanced industrial manufacturing visions and concepts, such as the “swarm production” (non-linear and fully de-centralized production), is defined and decomposed in a simplified steps, highlighting relevant industrial use cases, their associated communication requirements, as well as the integrated technological wireless solutions applicable to each of them. Further, the paper introduces the Aalborg University 5G Smart Production Lab, an industrial lab test environment specifically designed to prototype and demonstrate different industrial IoT (IIoT) use cases enabled by the integration of robotics, edge-cloud platforms and autonomous systems operated over wireless technologies such as 4G LTE, 5G NR, Wi-Fi and LoRa. Examples of two successful operational trials are also presented for two use cases: wireless control of industrial production and wireless control of autonomous mobile robots.