Edge Computing in Autonomous and Collaborative Assembly Lines

Industry 4.0 demands interconnected production lines that consist of modular assets. Recent advances of wireless communication technologies allow a large connectivity of devices and approach the performance of wireline communication, specifically regarding throughput, latency and reliability. As a result, more and more time critical connections can be performed wirelessly. Both attributes foster the emergence of edge computing, a concept that can efficiently utilize distributed computational resources. This is particularly beneficial for modular assets that have limited energy supply and capacity of computation hardware. Autonomous mobile robots offer high potential for object transportation, inspection and manipulation in shared workspaces with human operators. With edge computing, heavy computations can then be offloaded to more powerful computers or edge data centers to speed up the decision-making process and increase the productivity. For an efficient orchestration strategy of computation and communication resources, various task requirements in terms of latency, bandwidth, cost and energy must be considered. To this end, we aim at evaluating the requirements in autonomous and collaborative assembly lines, a use case that comprises diverse tasks including latency-sensitive ones in dynamic, uncertain, multi-agent environments. This work focuses on discussing latency requirements on the basis of a collaborative safety mode and autonomous robotic insertion.