5G enhanced robot autonomy
5G-ERA is oriented towards a user-centric paradigm of integrating vertical knowledge into the existing standardised 5G testing framework to improve Quality of Experience (QoE). The project addresses the new challenges on experimental facilities for the vertical developers and designers through the following activities: 1) integrating operational processes of essential autonomous robotic capabilities into Open Source MANO (OSM), ensuring the vertical specific adaptation of existing experimentation facilities, 2) realising an intent-based networking paradigm by aligning the end-to-end (E2E) resource optimisation with the autonomous operations, ensuring effective policy to be designed 3) Cloud native Network Services (NSs) on the experimental facilities will create, ensuring robotic applications exploiting NFV/SDN infrastructures efficiently, 4) extending the experimentation facilities into robotic domains thorough standard APIs under Robot Operating System (ROS), prompting third-parties’ experimentation activities as well as engagement from new players.

Robot autonomy is essential for many 5G vertical sectors and can provide multiple benefits in automated mobility, Industry 4.0 and healthcare. 5G technology, on the other hand, has the great potential to enhance the robot autonomy. Use cases from four vertical sectors, namely public protection and disaster relief (PPDR), transport, healthcare and manufacturing will be validated in the project by rapid prototyping of NetApp solutions and enhanced vertical experiences on autonomy. These case studies can be regarded as showcases of the potential of 5G and 5G-ERA to the acceleration of the ongoing convergence of robotics, AI & cloud computing; and to unlock a next level of autonomy through 5G based learning in general.