As a shaper of 5G in the industrial sector, the 5G-ACIA pursues the strategic goal of evaluating and validating important 5G functions for industrial applications in realistic scenarios. For this reason, a call was made last year among the 5G-ACIA member organizations to install testbeds. At the beginning of 2021, the 5G-ACIA gave its blessing to the first four testbeds. These testbeds will investigate and evaluate the possibilities of 5G in various industrial use cases, providing important insights and valuable feedback to all stakeholders in the field of industrial 5G. An overview of the four testbeds:

Testbed 5G-based industrial robotics

ABB and Ericsson have teamed up to build a 5G testbed at the Ericsson Smart Factory in Kista, Sweden, as part of the EU 5G-SMART project to explore how 5G can improve manufacturing use cases, with a focus on robotics. The main goal of the testbed is to investigate and validate use cases where the software controlling the industrial robots is moved from the robots themselves to an edge cloud platform and connected to the robots via 5G. Other functions to be validated include machine vision for object recognition and localization in the edge cloud, storage of the robot status in the edge cloud and support for the operator in the workshop based on augmented reality.

5G-SMART testbed in the Bosch semiconductor factory

Bosch and Ericsson are jointly validating 5G technology and its use cases in industrial automation by setting up and operating a 5G testbed at Bosch's semiconductor manufacturing facility in Reutlingen. The testbed comprises a stand-alone, non-public 5G indoor network implementation covering an industrial production hall of 8000 m2. The aim of the testbed is to demonstrate how 5G supports factory automation and intralogistics in a real production environment. This will be achieved by developing and testing use cases such as 5G-enabled, cloud-controlled automated guided vehicles (AGVs) and industrial Ethernet over 5G on the factory floor.

Testbed 5G-based smart manufacturing and industrial AI services

The testbed for 5G-based smart manufacturing and industrial AI services at Huawei is designed to accelerate the deployment of 5G mobile private networks with 5G stand-alone. The aim of the testbed is to develop and validate novel solutions for connected smart factories and scalable AI services over the next three years, taking into account the next versions of the 5G standard. For this reason, the environment includes both validation and performance measurement activities for the following use cases

• Connected AGVs (Automated Guided Vehicles) with AI Machine Vision Cloud processing for quality control
• Predictive maintenance with wireless connected monitoring
• Machine verification for safety & security of wirelessly connected automation modules

The testbed will analyze network and cloud edge intelligence requirements to enable easy replication on the factory floor. As it is part of Huawei 's OpenLab facilities in Munich, the testbed utilizes Huawei's 5G stand-alone network, emulating real 5G MPN conditions in industrial environments. It is future-proof with regard to the next 3GPP releases and supports network slicing, TSN, URLLC and more.

The knowledge gained from the testbed will be shared with 5G-ACIA members and all interested 5G ecosystem stakeholders, to whom Huawei will provide advice. The testbed will also enable Huawei to contribute 5G-based AI capabilities to GAIA-X, the European initiative for a unified ecosystem of cloud and data service infrastructure.

Testbed 5G Industry Campus Europe

The testbed consists of a 5G indoor and outdoor solution that extends across the industrial production hall of the Fraunhofer IPT in Aachen. Here, the testbed partners Fraunhofer IPT, Ericsson, u-blox and Marposs are developing and validating a multi-sensor platform for workpiece and machine monitoring as well as an acoustic emission sensor system for monitoring the condition of the cutting tool. In addition, the different data sources are synchronized by a novel synchronization device to merge the data into a digital twin. The testbed is part of the EU 5G-SMART project.