Verizon claimed that smart mobile robots will need 5G to guide them
Wi-Fi doesn't cut it for this case, the operator said
Certain enterprises are already starting to deploy such robots
Verizon highlighted the use of 5G connectivity — over Wi-Fi — for the autonomous mobile robots that it is starting to roll along the factory floor.
“Cellular technology is really good at mobile devices. Wi-Fi is not. Wi-Fi doesn’t innately hand over between access points,” said Bill Stafford, associate director of robotics in the emerging technology solutions group at Verizon, during a demonstration of robotics at Verizon’s 5G day in Basking Ridge, N.J. last Thursday. He was highlighting one of the main reasons why an autonomous mobile robot might need a 5G connection over a private network to handle tasks reliably.
Stafford introduced a demonstration of a robot used in a factory environment.
“An autonomous mobile robot will guide itself, does all the compute onboard, doesn’t have all the wire guides, or any type of QR code, that would normally be used to navigate the robot throughout the facility, ” he said.
“We have several partner clients in the auto manufacturing industry,” Stafford said. “They've been doing robots for quite a while. They’re at the scale of thousands of robots, and what they’re starting to see is a degradation in their Wi-Fi capabilities...as we increase the number of autonomous devices that are living on our Wi-Fi networks, the Wi-Fi is just not keeping up.”
Security is one of the major reasons, Stafford said: “For this device specifically we’ve actually provisioned SIM cards...so a warehouse says ‘I want these 100 devices and only these devices to be on our network, everyone else is out’” That is quite a bit different from a panoply of Wi-Fi connections you can usually see and even access if you go into a facility.
According to Stafford, it's really important for robots to use 5G for its decrease in network latency and its increase in speed. Latency is a particular concern for Wi-Fi networks, especially when dealing with objects like autonomous robots where you can’t have these vehicles stalling or jittering around in the middle of a task.
Factories can also reduce the amount of infrastructure required with 5G compared to Wi-Fi. Stafford said that a single $12,000 5G cellular node could cover the same area covered by around 30 Wi-Fi nodes.
Ericsson’s Cradlepoint gave similar reasons recently for Toyota replacing Wi-Fi with private 5G in a forklift factory in the United States. They said that the Wi-Fi gave “uneven” performance inside the factory and no coverage outside.