Private 5G Solutions for Mobile Industrial Robots: A Feasibility Study

Mobile robots are an essential part of the vision of flexible production in a smart factory. To monitor and connect the robots, reliable and low latency communication is necessary. In this work, we conduct packet-based active measurements to evaluate the performance of a state-of-the-art 5G standalone system in a production environment. The focus is on whether 5G connections can meet the requirements specified by 3G PP in terms of delay and reliability. The results indicate that without cross-traffic, the requirement of a delay of less than 10 ms for 99.9 % of the packets can be met for the remote control and fleet management of mobile robots. However, as soon as cross-traffic is injected, especially in the uplink, the upper percentiles of the delay increase significantly, thus failing to hold the reliability requirements.