6G REFERENCE

This scenario related to the vertical sector Industry 4.0/Manufacturing is focused on providing accurate sensing and localisation integrated with communications. However, required user data rates and area capacity are far lower than those in a Urban square, so more resources can be devoted to provide accurate sensing.
Large indoor complex facilities including large cranes, machines, robots, automatic guided vehicles, workers on motorised pallet trucks or similar and/or pedestrian workers. The area is largely obstructed by the presence of such large industrial furniture, so a dense radio unit deployment assisted by some reflective intelligent surface is considered to keep good propagation conditions. The radio units are directly or indirectly connected to a centralised processing unit, and a mixture of cabled and over-the-air links is envisaged.
6G-REFERENCE system provides communication services to workers and “intelligent industrial agents” (i.e. automated cranes, machines, robots, vehicles), requiring moderate to low data rate and area capacities. On top of that, it provides fundamental accurate sensing services. First, such a complex scenario mixing automated machines and human workers requires security measures to avoid collisions between machines/vehicles or accidents with workers. Therefore, sensing and localisation services here include detecting and tracking workers and mobile agents and predicting/avoiding collisions. Beyond this crucial application, sensing and localisation can be also used to monitor and control pathways and intersections shared by automated and human-driven vehicles and to assist the operation of robots with a high level of autonomy. This use case can be extended to the full control of collaborative robots, but it would require reliability and latency requirements that are out of the scope of this project.