Investigating the 5G Handover in Autonomous Mobile Robotic Applications

In industrial automation, Autonomous Mobile Robot (AMR) applications have been widely integrated into facilities to improve manufacturing, productivity, and flexibility of productive areas. These advancements are largely attributed to wireless connectivity such as 5G or Wi-Fi. The unlicensed networks such as Wi-Fi, currently face performance issues due to elec-tromagnetic interferences from other overlapping neighboring networks and therefore cannot guarantee reliability or scalability for such a mission-critical task. This raises the question of whether 5G could be the wireless technology to drive the expected digital transformation. To ensure the stability of connectivity for seamless operations, it is crucial to investigate whether the handover in 5G, which differs significantly from traditional Wi-Fi procedures, is suitable for the productive environment. The handover in mobile networks such as 5G is understood to be the transfer of the connection from one cell to another. For example, in productive environments, the handover is required when the AMR moves between different halls with multiple small cells and needs to be reconnected to another cell for a better signal quality. This paper addresses this issue and presents an exemplary investigation, in which the handover is monitored for an AMR application. Our results show that the handover process is completed without any detectable delay or packet loss during the data transmission. The results also indicate that the use of a 5G campus network could be a key enabler for the implementation of mission-critical tasks and give insights into the potential of 5G for AMR applications in industrial automation.