KUKA and Huawei X Labs jointly show the connected industrial robot with 5G enabling tech

[Barcelona, Spain, March 6, 2017] KUKA and Huawei X Labs unveiled the innovative and revolutionary future collaborative robots showcase with 5G-oriented cellular wireless technology at the MWC GSMA Innovation City.

The two robot arms perform the dancing and drumming in a precise synchronization and seamless collaboration manner. Importantly, the communication between the two cooperating robots is based on 5G oriented technical prototype rather than cable.

KUKA robot integrated with Huawei 5G technology

Since KUKA and Huawei signed the memorandum of understanding (MoU) at CeBIT 2016 March 14, both sides have spent quite a lot of efforts on the concentrated research and test about the cellular wireless tech enabling the smart manufacturing, and speeding up the industry 4.0 transformation. The successful demo in this MWC is a milestone for the joint innovation project between KUKA and Huawei, and verifies the cellular based real time control for smart manufacturing. According to the joint test in KUKA innovation Lab, the 5G live demonstration highlighted some of the capabilities offered by the new technology, achieving latency as low as 1ms with 1μs clock synchronization and reliability 99.999%.

“5G cellular wireless technology will enable KUKA to provide robot-based production systems with even more outstanding flexibility through wireless machine to machine and machine to cloud communication”, said Stefan Lampa, CEO of KUKA Robotics. The connections in smart manufacturing with wireless technology will be a trend. According to the Huawei X Labs prediction, there are over 10 billion industrial connections in Smart Manufactory by 2025.

“Industrial robot with cellular communication technology is one of the four research areas for Huawei X Labs 2017. The cellular connectivity will play an important role for the smart manufacturing.” said Ying Weimin, President of Huawei R&D Wireless Networks. “Huawei X Labs will continually cooperate with more partners to explore together and innovate together for future mobile application scenarios.”

X Labs is a brand-new platform designed to get together telecom operators, technical vendors and partners from vertical sectors to explore future mobile application scenarios, drive business and technical innovations and build an open ecosystem. X Labs have set up three laboratories, which aim to explore three major areas: people-to-people connectivity, applications for vertical sectors and applications in household.