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

This article presents an overview of current Industry 4.0 applied research topics, addressed from both the industrial production and wireless communication points of view. A roadmap toward achieving the more advanced industrial manufacturing visions and concepts, such as “swarm production” (nonlinear and fully decentralized production) is defined, highlighting relevant industrial use cases, their associated communication requirements, as well as the integrated technological wireless solutions applicable to each of them. Further, the article introduces the Aalborg University 5G Smart Production Lab, an industrial lab test environment specifically designed to prototype and demonstrate different Industrial IoT use cases enabled by the integration of robotics, edge-cloud platforms, and autonomous systems operated over wireless technologies such as 4G, 5G, and Wi-Fi. Wireless performance results from various operational trials are also presented for two use cases: wireless control of industrial production and wireless control of autonomous mobile robots.