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Purpose – The purpose of this study has been to evaluate the technology of autonomous mobile manipulation in a real world industrial manufacturing environment. The objective has been to obtain experience in the integration with existing equipment and determine key challenges in maturing the technology to a level of readiness suitable for industry. Despite much research within the topic of industrial mobile manipulation, the technology has not yet found its way to the industry. To mature the technology to a level of readiness suitable for industry real-world experience is crucial. This paper reports from such a real-world industrial experiment with two mobile manipulators. Design/methodology/approach – In the experiment, autonomous industrial mobile manipulators are integrated into the actual manufacturing environment of the pump manufacturer Grundfos. The two robots together solve the task of producing rotors; a task constituted by several sub-tasks ranging from logistics to complex assembly. With a total duration of 10 days, the experiment includes workspace adaptation, safety regulations, rapid robot instruction and running production. Findings – With a setup time of less than one day, it was possible to program both robots to perform the production scenario in collaboration. Despite the success, the experiment clearly demonstrated several topics in need of further research before the technology can be made available to the industry: robustness and cycle time, safety investigations and possibly standardization, and robot and workstation re-configurability. Originality/value – Despite the attention of research around the world, the topic of industrial mobile manipulation has only seen a limited number of real-world integrations. This work reports from a comprehensive integration into a real-world running production and thus reports on the key challenges identified from this integration.

The fourth industrial revolution, or Industry 4.0 (I4.0), makes use of wireless technologies together with other industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) technologies, cyber–physical systems (CPS), and edge computing to enable the optimization and the faster re-configuration of industrial production processes. As I4.0 deployments are ramping up, the practical integration of 5G wireless systems with existing industrial applications is being explored in both Industry and Academia, in order to find optimized strategies and to develop guidelines oriented towards ensuring the success of the industrial wireless digitalization process. This paper explores the challenges arisen from such integration between industrial systems and 5G wireless, and presents a framework applicable to achieve a structured and successful integration. The paper aims at describing the different aspects of the framework such as the application operational flow and its associated tools, developed based on analytical and experimental applied research methodologies. The applicability of the framework is illustrated by addressing the integration of 5G technology into a specific industrial use case: the control of autonomous mobile robots. The results indicate that 5G technology can be used for reliable fleet management control of autonomous mobile robots in industrial scenarios, and that 5G can support the migration of the on-board path planning intelligence to the edge-cloud.