Wireless Control for Smart Manufacturing: Recent Approaches and Open Challenges

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

Abstract

Smart manufacturing aims to overcome the limitations of today's rigid assembly lines by making the material flow and manufacturing process more flexible, versatile, and scalable. The main economic drivers are higher resource and cost efficiency as the manufacturers can more quickly adapt to changing market needs and also increase the lifespan of their production sites. The ability to close feedback loops fast and reliably over long distances among mobile robots, remote sensors, and human operators is a key enabler for smart manufacturing. Thus, this article provides a perspective on control and coordination over wireless networks. Based on an analysis of real-world use cases, we identify the main technical challenges that need to be solved to close the large gap between the current state of the art in industry and the vision of smart manufacturing. We discuss to what extent existing control-over-wireless solutions in the literature address those challenges, including our own approach toward a tight integration of control and wireless communication. In addition to a theoretical analysis of closed-loop stability, practical experiments on a cyber-physical testbed demonstrate that our approach supports relevant smart manufacturing scenarios. This article concludes with a discussion of open challenges and future research directions.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Article number9264637
Pages (from-to)441-467
Number of pages27
JournalProceedings of the IEEE
Volume109
Issue number4
Publication statusPublished - 19 Nov 2020
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

Scopus 85096873445

Keywords

Research priority areas of TU Dresden

Keywords

  • Wireless communication, Drones, Smart manufacturing, Wireless sensor networks, Task analysis, Networked control systems, Cyber-physical systems, Mesh networks, Fourth Industrial Revolution