Vision of a 6G infrastructure for the industry of tomorrow

Many of the ideas of Industry 4.0 require a more powerful communication infrastructure than that which already exists today with 5G. The sixth generation of mobile communications, 6G, is expected to deliver faster data transfer rates, lower latency times, greater reliability and better localization for intelligent and flexible applications.

In the Open6GHub project, DFKI researchers are investigating numerous components that will be required to implement the new standard. Two exhibits at the 6G platform stand, managed by the Rhineland-Palatinate Technical University of Kaiserslautern-Landau in Hall 14, Stand H6 (53), will illustrate this:

The first exhibit is dedicated to the high-precision time synchronization of industrial applications such as mobile robots. A delta robot, often used for packaging, and a surface gantry robot, as found in 3D printers, will interact wirelessly with each other in real time. A non-invasive time synchronization protocol using 5G will demonstrate how synchronization accuracies of ± 10 µs (microseconds) can be achieved.

The second exhibit addresses a high level of interconnectivity between devices. Even without wiring individual parts in a machine, it should be possible to control the parts reliably via the network.