Frankfurt/Main, 12 April 2021 – Shaping 5G in the industrial domain, 5G-ACIA is pursuing the strategic goal of evaluating and validating key 5G capabilities for industrial applications in realistic scenarios. For this reason, a call for testbeds was launched among the 5G-ACIA member organisations in 2020 and the 5G-ACIA working group “Validation and tests” created a corresponding framework. In early 2021 the first four endorsed testbeds were successfully approved by 5G-ACIA. These testbeds examine and evaluate the opportunities of 5G in several industrial use cases and thereby provide keen insights and valuable feedback to all stakeholders in industrial 5G. The four testbeds are briefly sketched here.

Testbed 5G-Based Industrial Robotics
ABB and Ericsson have teamed up and built within the EU project 5G-SMART a 5G testbed in the Ericsson smart factory in Kista, Sweden, to explore how 5G can enhance manufacturing use cases, with focus on robotics. The main objective of the testbed is to investigate and validate use cases where software controlling the industrial robots is moved from the robots themselves into an edge cloud platform and is connected to the robots via 5G. Other functionality to be validated includes machine vision for object recognition and localization in the edge cloud, robot status repository in the edge cloud and operator shopfloor support based on augmented reality.
Krister Landernäs, ABB Corporate Research Sweden: “ABB and Ericsson can enable the possibilities of 5G and apply the technology to strengthen the competitiveness for our customers. Industrial robots play an important role in the production of the future and they will be used in more and more areas that we previously could not dream of.”

5G-SMART Testbed in Bosch Semiconductor Factory
Bosch and Ericsson join forces to validate the 5G technology and its industrial automation use cases through setting up and operating a 5G testbed in the Bosch semiconductor production plant in Reutlingen, Germany. The testbed features a standalone, non-public, indoor 5G network deployment covering an industrial manufacturing hall of 8000 m2. The objective of the testbed is to demonstrate how 5G empowers factory automation and intralogistics in a real production environment. This will be achieved through developing and trialing use cases such as 5G-enabled cloud-controlled automated guided vehicles (AGVs) and industrial Ethernet over 5G on the factory floor.
“5G is a very powerful communication technology in stability, performance and speed. It will be a central building block for flexible concepts in our digitalization strategy. With 5G, new technologies such as augmented reality or autonomous transport systems, can be integrated in a meaningful way,” says Peter Buseck, Robert Bosch GmbH, Semiconductor Plant Reutlingen.

Testbed 5G-Based Smart Manufacturing and Industrial AI Services
Huawei and its industry partners will realize novel industrial scenarios of networked production and AI services, enabled by 5G wireless connectivity. This unique testbed encompasses both validation and performance measurement activities for three different use cases including: (i) Connected AGVs with AI machine vision cloud processing for quality control, (ii) Preventive maintenance with wireless connected monitoring and (iii) Machine verification for safety & security of wireless connected automation modules.
This testbed is part of Huawei’s OpenLab facilities in Munich-Germany, utilising Huawei’s 5G stand-alone (SA) network, thus emulating real 5G MPN conditions in industrial environments. It is future-proof for next 3GPP releases and support of network slicing, TSN, URLLC etc Furthermore, it is bringing 5G enabled AI capabilities into the EU GAIA-X project.
“Enabled by the 5G-ACIA endorsed testbed, Huawei and its partners are accelerating the implementation of 5G and AI in industrial environments focusing on real needs in diverse industrial scenarios” said Josef Eichinger from Huawei’s European Standardization & Industry Development Department.

Testbed 5G-Industry Campus Europe
The testbed consists of a 5G indoor and outdoor solution covering the industrial shopfloor of Fraunhofer IPT in Aachen. Here, a multi-sensor platform for workpiece and machine monitoring and an acoustic emission sensor system for monitoring the condition of the cutting tool will be developed and validated by the testbed partners Fraunhofer IPT, Ericsson, u-blox and Marposs. Furthermore, the different data sources will be synchronized by a novel synchronization device to fuse data into a digital twin. The testbed is part of the EU project 5G-SMART.
Niels König, Fraunhofer IPT: “The testbed at 5G-Industry Campus Europe provides essential insights into the use and benefits of 5G in connected, adaptive manufacturing. It perfectly reflects the 5G-ACIA by combining competencies from mobile and production technologies. We are bringing 5G to the chip!”