Wireless Control for Smart Manufacturing: Recent Approaches and Open Challenges

TL;DR

This paper reviews wireless control techniques for smart manufacturing, analyzing real-world challenges, existing solutions, and proposing an integrated control-wireless approach supported by experiments, highlighting open issues and future directions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of wireless control challenges in smart manufacturing and introduces an integrated control and wireless communication approach with experimental validation.

Findings

Our approach supports key smart manufacturing scenarios.

Experimental results demonstrate system stability.

Identifies open challenges for future research.

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. The article concludes with a discussion of open challenges and future research directions.