Remote operation use case by 5Growth running on 5G EVE platform

Posted 25 March 2021

5G EVE is supporting a vertical industry use case by 5G PPP project 5Growth (5G-enabled Growth in Vertical Industries). The 5Growth use case on remote operation of quality equipment, which is led by Innovalia, has been successfully implemented on the 5G EVE platform and is currently being validated through experimental trials.

Remote operation of quality equipment

The 5Growth use case involves remotely operating and maintaining a 3D scanner and other quality equipment via a 5G connection. The use case takes advantage of 5G latency reduction to enable the implementation of a global virtual joystick for remote human programming of a 3D scanner, Cartesian robot trajectories and hybrid (tactile/optical scanning) data acquisition; i.e. quality control routines. 5G connectivity is provided between a control software on one end, and a 3D optical scanner and a camera on the other end. The camera streams a video that is used by the metrology expert on the other end to be able to control the scanner. The expert also receives the results of the optical scan for analysis. In this way, one of the most expensive maintenance tasks for the 3D scanner will be significantly reduced thanks to the use of the 5G technologies, which will effectively enable remote control operations, thus avoiding the cost of on-site human interventions. The new remote operation capabilities of the 3D scanner will reduce by half the total preparation of deployment time of a new measuring program, gaining agility on the process of changing the parts being measured. Also, this will bring a higher service availability, as specialised personnel will not be unavailable because of travelling.

Interaction between 5Growth and the 5G EVE platform

Plenty of progress has already been achieved so far in the interaction between 5Growth and the 5G EVE platform:

The 5Growth platform has been defined as a site on the 5G EVE platform.
The Vertical Service Blueprints and Descriptors have been onboarded independently on both 5Growth (via Vertical Slicer) and 5G EVE (via the 5G EVE Portal).
The Experiment Descriptor (KPIs empty so far) and the Test Case Descriptor have been onboarded via the 5G EVE Portal.
The Network Service Descriptor and the VNF packages have been onboarded on the 5Growth stack.
The vertical can instantiate the service by interacting with the 5Growth Vertical Slicer (5Gr-VS). The 5Gr-VS sends the request to the 5G EVE portal. The 5G EVE site manager accepts the experiment. Through the 5G EVE Interworking Layer, the 5Growth site is selected. The commands are sent to the 5Growth Service Orchestrator for instantiating the Network Service and the VNF.
For this use case 5Growth is using the common 5G network infrastructure. In the future, 5Growth plans to also get the KPI reports from the 5G EVE platform as well as integrate the 5Growth and 5G EVE monitoring platforms.