5G and the development direction of industrial automation control
September 18, 2019 17:49:02
5G can provide extremely low time extension, high reliability, and massive connectivity networks, making it possible for closed-loop control applications to be connected via wireless networks. The measured capability based on Huawei 5G: the airport delay can reach 0.4ms, the downlink rate of a single cell can reach 20Gbps, and the maximum cell can support 10 million + connections. It can be seen that in mobile communication networks, only 5G networks can meet the network requirements of closed-loop control.
Industrial automation control is the most basic application in manufacturing plants, and the core is closed-loop control system. Each sensor is continuously measured during the control cycle of the system, and the measurement data is transmitted to the controller to set the actuator.
Typical closed-loop control process, the cycle is as low as ms level, so the system communication delay needs to reach ms level or even lower to ensure that the control system to achieve accurate control, but also has high reliability requirements. If the delay is too long in the production process, or the error of the control information during the data transmission may lead to the production shutdown, it will cause huge financial losses.
The 5G network can achieve end-to-end communication delay as low as 1ms and support 99.999% connection reliability, and the strong network capability can greatly meet the challenges of cloud robots on delay and reliability.
In intelligent manufacturing production scenarios, robots are required to have the ability of self-organization and collaboration to meet flexible production, which brings the demand for cloud-based robots. 5G network is the ideal communication network for cloud-based robots and is the key to enabling cloud-based robots. 5G slicing networks can provide end-to-end customized network support for cloud-based robot applications.
Compared with traditional robots, cloud-based robots need to be connected to the cloud control center through the network, based on the platform of ultra-high computing power, and through big data and artificial intelligence to carry out real-time computing control of the manufacturing process.
Through cloud technology robots will move a large number of computing functions and data storage functions to the cloud, which will greatly reduce the hardware cost and power consumption of the robot itself. And in order to meet the needs of flexible manufacturing, the robot needs to meet the requirements of free movement. Therefore, in the process of robot cloud, the wireless communication 5G network needs to have the characteristics of extremely low delay and high reliability.