Ericsson and Comau partner to explore potential of 5G

Comau and Ericsson will leverage existing and future 5G network technologies, IoT platforms, Cloud and Big Data solutions, in order to enable innovative services, increased competitiveness and efficiency for smart manufacturing, maintenance and quality control.

The collaboration also aims to establish a strong research and industrial community and an innovation ecosystem where Comau and Ericsson, their customers, academia, public authorities and other stakeholders may join and collaborate to boost ideas and share resources, in order to showcase the benefits of advanced IoT solutions for different applications.

Mauro Fenzi, CEO of Comau, a company that has been committed to developing solutions for Industry 4.0, focuses on the importance of the project: "Our strategy to make more and more 'open industrial automation' and easy-to-use technologies is enhanced by a new element, represented by the agreement signed with Ericsson.

This collaboration, and especially the synergy that comes from the union of the know-how of two great companies, enables us to develop the technological infrastructures for the communication networks of the 'Factory 4.0', applying them directly in industrial plants while complying to our fundamental values - security, speed and ease of use”.

Nunzio Mirtillo, Head of Region Mediterranean, Ericsson, says: “As the world becomes ever more digitally and globally connected, industries are experiencing an ICT-driven transformation.

This collaboration with Comau is an important milestone that can demonstrate how factories and industrial plants can leverage on 5G potential. The use of 5G technology offers extensive benefits to manufacturing processes, having the capacity, reliability and security to enable remote control and monitoring of processes. When connected to advanced analytics solutions, it is also able to assist analysing and predicting faults and potential threats before they occur.”

This new agreement is part of Ericsson’s ‘5G for Europe’ initiative, a cross-industry 5G research and development program involving a range of European markets such as Sweden, Spain, Germany, Austria and Italy. With Ericsson as driver, the program focuses on delivering research, innovation and industrial pilots that use 5G networks combined with IoT and Cloud technologies.

The agreement is also a part of Comau’s cross-industry IoT R&D program – ‘Digital Workplace’ – which focuses on delivering research, innovation and industrial pilots that use next-generation wireless and wired networks, combined with IoT, AI, data analysis and visualisation, data management techniques and Cloud technologies.

Following this agreement, Comau has entered the ‘5G for Italy Initiative’, the cross-industry 5G research and development programme launched by Ericsson together with TIM. Scope of the initiative is to identify innovative solutions enabled by the 5G technology within the Cloud Robotics and Security segments.

The final scope of the project is to enable a secure and reliable cloud-based wireless monitoring solution to control and process sensors data from robots and the plant in real time, applying analytic functionalities based on encrypted processing and providing feedback to the customers for preventive maintenance.