Tue, 27 April, 2021
TWI has joined a new 5G Research and Innovation project titled, 5G-ERA (5G Enhanced Robot Autonomy).
An online kick-off meeting was held in January 2021, including the 13 partners involved in the project, which is being coordinated by Robotnik Automation SLL. TWI is joined by fellow consortium members Iquadrat Informatica S.L, eBOS Technologies Ltd, HAL Robotics Ltd, Cognitechna s.r.o, BringAuto s.r.o, Wings ICT Solutions, University of Bedfordshire, Brno University of Technology, OTE Group, NEC Laboratories Europe GmbH and Cal-Tek S.r.l.
The aim of the 5G-ERA Project is aiming to provide an enhanced 5G experimentation facility and the relevant network applications for third party application developers to test and qualify their applications.
These applications will focus on robotic autonomy, which is essential for many 5G vertical sectors and can deliver multiple benefits in automated mobility, Industry 4.0 and healthcare.
To this end, the project will seek to integrate vertical knowledge into the existing standardised 5G testing framework to improve quality of experience (QoE) with the following objectives:
- An intent-based networking paradigm for optimised QoE to support enhanced robot autonomy in real-world applications
- A 5G-ERA middleware enabling cloud native resource provision over autonomous robots
- Standardised APIs by integrating ROS with OSM
- Showcase enhanced QoE on experimental facilities for vertical applications
As part of the project, TWI will help investigate the use of a 5G-based remote assistant NetApp during brazing processes. This will collate data from sensors in the production cell to enable automation and digitisation of the process for the manufacture of safety-critical components using a robot to replace some manual operations within the process control. A field trial will be conducted at TWI to test the system, including brazing robot operation, edge operation planning services, a central cloud service, a learning service, smart environment service, an intervention service in case of problems, and a security management identity service.
TWI is also involved in providing a testbed for private 5G networks that can operate on the premises of enterprises, organisations and governments to meet data and communication needs. These networks are fully under the control of the operating organisation to connect people, machines, vehicles, sensors and other devices. Private Network solutions are designed to provide robust and cost-effective 2-way communication of data between multiple LTE/5G devices and the applications in the customer data centre or in the Cloud, serving the end-to-end use cases for those devices.
You can find out more about 5G here and discover more about the 5G-ERA Project here.
The 5G-ERA project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 856691