As part of Deutsche Telekom’s hubraum 5G Prototyping program, companies from a variety of countries showcased their 5G visions under real conditions. Logistics company EK Automation from Rosengarten, near Hamburg, presented its idea for an automated guided vehicle system (AGV). This system requires a campus network for connection to the cloud, i.e. a locally defined wireless network based on 5G.

For the demonstration, EK Automation equipped its fully automated transport robot ‘Fast Move’ with several 3D cameras and implemented 3D obstacle detection with dynamic path planning in the edge cloud . Via the campus network, the transport robot sent the images from the 3D cameras to the cloud, where they were analyzed and processed into instructions for the robot, enabling it to detect and avoid obstacles on its route. Combining several such transport robots could enable entire material flow systems to be set up in the smart factory – but only once campus networks became available for companies.