5GSmartFact

The transition into the 4th industrial revolution promises to integrate IoT and cyber-physical systems into the industrial domain and to boost the productivity of industrial verticals thanks to a radical automation of all the phases of production. Communications are key to enable i4.0, but are subject to the stringent requirements of automated applications in terms of availability, reliability, low latency, integrity, scalability, safety and positioning accuracy. A wirelessly connected factory enables novel mobile robots, easy reconfiguration of assembly lines and migration of embedded control functions to the virtually infinite computational/cache resources and flexibility of edge clouds. From a managerial perspective, integrated billing and tracking capabilities of 5G facilitate novel models such as that can drive a business disruption. As a result, the i4.0 ecosystem is an opportunity for the wireless community and has become one of the key targets of 5G. From a technical side, the development of wireless i4.0 entails a paradigm shift from reactive and centralized networks towards massive, ultrareliable and proactive networks that may operate in wide remote scenarios, with thousands of devices, uncertainty, high dynamics, rare events, unpredictable interference and harsh conditions. Merging 5G networks and i4.0 comes with its own difficulties, because these two domains have been disjoint so far. Here is the key opening identified by 5GSmartFact: the need of a surge of skilled researchers and engineers in the upcoming years to work at the crossroads of factory automation and 5G evolutions. Having this in mind, the objective of the research programme is to train young researches to be able to analyse, design, develop and assess the deployment of 5G networks that target the i4.0 requirements and exploit them to integrate current robot applications which might lead to a complete redesign of robot architectures and hence to a leap forward in the automation industry.