Mobile Robots Design for Industrial Applications in Private 5G Networks: Essential Factors to Consider

Abstract

This paper describes the architecture and performance measurements of mobile robots in a standalone (SA) 5G Industrial Testbed (5G-ITB) including Edge orchestration for Industry 4.0 smart factory applications. This paper starts with the end-to-end system design considerations for an over-the-air (OTA) private 5G network and presents system characteristics such as the radio cell coverage, throughput, latency, handover across cells, and mobility. Furthermore, a 5G-connected autonomous mobile robot (AMR) ecosystem over a standalone (SA) private 5G network is proposed to illustrate the flexibility and advantages of workload consolidation (WLC) between IoT Edge and network Edge solutions. Finally, we discuss our experimental measurement results and future development opportunities.