Wireless- and 5G-enabled industrial automation is expected to include a plethora of different applications with a wide variety of requirements. In this article, evaluations are undertaken for the deployment of 5G in realistic industrial production environments with realistic deployment settings. Both deployments using commercial 5G systems and a 5G prototype system including pre-commercial and standard compliant URLLC functionality have been investigated. Systematic latency and reliability measurements were performed, over the air and in live networks, for different packet sizes, different devices, and networks with different capabilities (at different sites) to characterize the expected performance. The results indicate that today’s 5G latency performance significantly depends on packet size, transmission direction (uplink or downlink), and network configuration as well as on the end device’s design and capabilities. Our over-the-air measurements also empirically show that 5G technology and future networks have the capability of providing one-way latency of around 1 ms in both uplink and downlink for the various packet sizes tested. It is concluded that the requirements for very low latencies can be achieved with high reliability guarantees, as required in some of the most stringent industrial IoT applications.

The digitization of industries enables a rapid transformation from mass production to individualized manufacturing. Communication plays an essential role in this digital transformation; in particular, wireless communication enables a high degree of flexibility, dynamic interactions, and mobility support in production systems. This paper presents an implementation of a 5G system with Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) and analyzes a typical industrial use case involving cloud-controlled mobile robots. A prototype setup integrating 5G in a TSN network has been completed to evaluate the 5G-TSN performance for industrial applications. The integrated 5G and TSN prototype has been evaluated with over the air tests in an industrial shopfloor using TSN features of traffic shaping and scheduling.

Preterm birth is a major and widespread healthcare issue involving 15 million babies every year.¹ It is a major cause of death in children under the age of 5, and a high percentage of the survivors suffer neurological disabilities.² The neurodevelopment of preterm newborns can be negatively affected by hemodynamic instabilities during the first hours and days of life, where brain lesions are often developed.^3,4 It is hypothesized that brain-oriented intensive care of the preterm newborns would minimize these problems, but, to be effective, it would require the possibility to monitor the cerebral well-being at the cot-side in real time. Unfortunately, such a technology is still lacking in the daily clinical care.

The constantly growing interest and range of applications of advanced cell, gene and regenerative therapies raise the need for efficient production of biological material and novel treatment technologies. Many of the production and manipulation processes of such materials are still manual and, therefore, need to be transferred to a fully automated execution. Developers of such systems face several challenges, one of which is mechanical and communication interfaces in biotechnological devices. In the present state, many devices are still designed for manual use and rarely provide a connection to external software for receiving commands and sending data. However, a trend towards automation on the device market is clearly visible, and the communication protocol, Open Platform Communications Data Access (OPC DA), seems to become established as a standard in biotech devices. A rising number of vendors offer software for device control and automated processing, some of which even allow the integration of devices from multiple manufacturers. The high, application-specific need in functionalities, flexibility and adaptivity makes it difficult to find the best solution and, in many cases, leads to the creation of new custom-designed software. This report shall give an overview of existing technologies, devices and software for laboratory automation of biotechnological processes. Furthermore, it presents an outlook for possible future developments and standardizations.

We report a method of high-speed phase contrast and bright field microscopy which permits large cell culture vessels to be scanned at much higher speed (up to 30 times faster) than when conventional methods are used without compromising image quality. The object under investigation moves continuously and is captured using a flash illumination which creates an exposure time short enough to prevent motion blur. During the scan the object always stays in focus due to a novel hardware-autofocus system.