White Paper

5G paves the way for the adoption of robots

Discover Reply's end-to-end support in the innovative 5G-powered robotics field.

The dawn of the

Cloud Robotics era

The robotics landscape has been growing fast over the last few years, but in order to realise its full potential, it’s necessary to enable the human supervision of large numbers of robots from remote locations: this step will bring us into the era of cloud robotics.
This revolution can be fully realised with the advent of 5G, which will provide the necessary connection for cloud robotics, in a totally mobile way: the 5G-controlled robots will be increasingly pervasive, enabling the creation of a new “Robot ecosystem” composed of UGV (Unmanned Ground Vehicle) and UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) fleets.

Reply is actively working in building the enablers for the adoption of a successful 5G cloud robotics approach, supporting customers’ strategies alongside different use cases, from teleoperations to food delivery.

5G & Robotics use cases

As the types of robots introduced on the market grow, so do the use cases for their application: Reply has identified the most interesting cases and impacts in different scenarios, and is working on it in order to effectively support companies in the implementation of cloud robotics.

Patrolling, Teleoperations & Inspections

Real-time decision making

Delivery

Logistics

Cloud Robotics approaches

To unlock the Robot as a Service (RaaS) scenario, it is essential to develop a backbone for horizontal cloud robotics platforms, capable of abstracting robotics applications from a single robot instance. The Robotic Operating System framework was designed for this reason: to provide a common ground of understanding to build such platforms on, encouraging the development of horizontal, hardware-independent cloud robotics platforms by some players in the market.

AWS Robomaker

Google Cloud Robotics Core

Google Cloud Robotics Core is an open-source platform that provides essential infrastructure for building and running robotics solutions for business automation. It enables operators to easily manage their robot fleets, including packaging and distribution of applications, bidirectional robot-cloud communication and easy access to Google Cloud Services. It builds upon standard Kubernetes management tools and several open-source packages.

Tim Cloud Robotics Infrastructure

TIM Cloud Robotics Infrastructure is a cloud robotics platform developed by the TIM Innovation Lab, entirely based on the ROS paradigm. Thanks to this platform, it is possible to allow the execution of the 'digital clone' of the physical robot entirely, either in the cloud, or on the robot, or in a hybrid way, thus making it suitable for both large and costly professional robots, both for much simpler, lighter ones.

Reply Robotics solution

The Robotics Solution developed by Reply helps customers using Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) in managing and leveraging robots for multiple mission types, e.g. inspections, damage detection, data capture, vision and AI. The solution brings together the complete robot fleet, automatically detects their attached payloads, and allows operators to design missions graphically with built in use cases based on the robot capabilities.

Reply is facing the challenge of
democratising robotics solutions

Leveraging on its strong know-how and partnership with cloud providers, telco operators, and players in the robotics industry, Reply can support its customers’ strategy in the robotics adoption journey, enabling the rise of a large set of applications and ecosystem.