ECC workshop on Control with 6G

Leefke Grosjean is a Master Researcher at Ericsson Research in Stockholm, Sweden. She is driving innovation for empowering industry with 5G/6G and showing the potential this transformation brings to industry, people, and society as a whole. She has several years of experience of leading large research projects, driving ecosystem engagements, and showcasing research excellence together with industry partners and academia. Previously she has been active in Ericsson's 5G standardization of channel codes. She holds an Msc. in Electrical Engineering and Information Theory from RWTH Technical University, Aachen, Germany, and a PhD in Telecommunications from KTH Technical University, Stockholm, Sweden.

The next generation of industrial cyber physical systems is expected to take advantage of innovative technologies, such as AI , cloud computing, while at the same time balancing resource constraints and sustainability constraints with requirements on ever increasing performance. A key technology to realize the transformation towards the cyber-physical continuum is wireless communication. Interconnecting devices in industrial systems wirelessly and connecting them to compute platforms brings not only flexibility but also a tremendous innovation potential. To exploit the full potential, in particular for real-time applications, there is a paradigm shift needed: In order to achieve superior performance communication, compute, and control can no longer be considered independently. Therefore, there is increasing importance in the emerging research area towards co-designing control applications in a holistic manner taking into consideration not only communication but also computing aspects. This talk sets the scene for the workshop by exploring the need for co-design, outlining key challenges and highlighting the role of 6G in this context.

Alf Isaksson is a corporate research fellow for automation and control at ABB and adjunct professor in automatic control at KTH. He has received his Ph.D. in automatic control in 1988 from Linköping University. He has been with ABB since 2001 and prior to that he was a full professor in automatic control at KTH.

The next generation of industrial cyber physical systems is expected to take advantage of innovative technologies, such as AI , cloud computing, while at the same time balancing resource constraints and sustainability constraints with requirements on ever increasing performance. A key technology to realize the transformation towards the cyber-physical continuum is wireless communication. Interconnecting devices in industrial systems wirelessly and connecting them to compute platforms brings not only flexibility but also a tremendous innovation potential. To exploit the full potential, in particular for real-time applications, there is a paradigm shift needed: In order to achieve superior performance communication, compute, and control can no longer be considered independently. Therefore, there is increasing importance in the emerging research area towards co-designing control applications in a holistic manner taking into consideration not only communication but also computing aspects. This talk sets the scene for the workshop by exploring the need for co-design, outlining key challenges and highlighting the role of 6G in this context.

James Gross is a professor with the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science School of KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm since November 2012. He is associate director of KTH Digital Futures and co-director of KTH’s comptence center on edge computing TECoSA. From 2014 – 2020 he was a member of the board of KTH’s Innovative Centre for Embedded Systems, while he served from 2016 – 2019 as director for KTH’s ACCESS Linnaeus Centre. His research interests are broadly in the area of mobile systems & networks, with a focus on critical machine-to-machine communications, edge computing, resource allocation as well as performance evaluation methods (in particular stochastic network calculus as well as age of information). Prior to joining KTH, he was assistant professor and head of the Mobile Network Performance Group at RWTH Aachen University from 2008 – 2012 as well as a member of the DFG-funded UMIC research centre of RWTH. James studied at TU Berlin and UC San Diego, and received his PhD from TU Berlin in 2006. 

James has published about 170 (peer-reviewed) papers in international journals and conferences. His work has been awarded multiple times, among them the best paper awards at ACM MSWiM 2015, the best demo paper award at IEEE WoWMoM 2015, the best paper award at IEEE WoWMoM 2009 and the best paper award at European Wireless 2009. In 2007, James was the recipient of the ITG/KuVS dissertation award for his PhD thesis.

The last decade has seen a substantial shift towards approaches and infrastructure services providing low latencies and high reliabilities. Examples of these technological developments are 5G URLLC, networking protocols like TSN and DetNet as well as edge computing. These developments have been motivated by the ambition to utilized networked infrastructures more and more as execution fabric for cyber-physical systems. However, despite these efforts todays deployments of such applications and infrastructures fall short in comparison to the visions of the last decade. In this talk we discuss reasons for this discrepancy and possible consequences for 6G network design. We advocate that the appeal of cyber-physical systems run over such networked infrastructures persists, however, new approaches are required to enable convergence and scalability of future infrastructures. Major findings from the current project Deterministic6G are presented as cornerstones of such future systems.

The integration of 5G and cloud technologies in the world of edge cloud robotics demonstrates their transformative potential for enhancing the adaptability and efficiency of robotic systems. This talk introduces the paradigm of fully flexible 5G edge cloud-enabled robotic systems for real-time applications. We discuss the communication, control, and computing requirements of such systems and explore their full potential. Key topics include how cloud-based scheduling mechanisms can achieve scalable and resource-efficient centralized control in multi-agent robotic systems and how stability in edge-offloaded centralized schemes can be ensured by leveraging the dynamic nature of cloud technologies. Additionally, we address the necessity for a robust communication scheme to facilitate effective information sharing in cloud-enabled robotic applications and how the dynamic needs of such operations can be met in real time through the strategic utilization of 5G QoS features. The insights presented pave the way toward the future of edge-enabled robotics, where fully flexible computing and communication capabilities are the key enablers.

George Nikolakopoulos works as the Chair Professor in robotics and artificial intelligence, at the Department of Computer Science, Electrical and Space Engineering, Luleå University of Technology (LTU), Sweden. He was also affiliated with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory for conducting collaborative research on Aerial Planetary Exploration and participated in the DARPA Grand challenge on Sub-T exploration with the CoSTAR team of JPL-NASA. He is a Director of euRobotics, and is a member of the Scientific Council of ARTEMIS and the IFAC TC on Robotics. He established the Digital Innovation Hub on Applied AI at LTU and also represents Sweden in the Technical Expert Group on Robotics and AI in the project MIRAI 2.0, promoting collaboration between Sweden and Japan. His main research interests are in the areas of field robotics, space autonomy, UAVs, automatic control applications, networked embedded controlled systems, wireless sensor and actuator networks, cyber-physical systems, and adaptive control.

Johan Eker is a Principal Researcher at Ericsson Research and a Professor in real-time control systems at Lund university. He earned his PhD in 1999 and then joined the Ptolemy group at UC Berkeley. He is the leading the WASP research arena on data-driven operations (WARA-Ops). His current research focus is on control of large scale compute systems, but his research interests range from programming language design for parallel hardware, real-time control systems, mobile communications. software design for mobile devices, adaptive resource management, IoT and cloud technology. He is the co-designer of the CAL Actor Language, which is part of the MPEG standard ISO/IEC 23001-4:2011. He holds over 70 granted patents in the areas of telecom, IoT and cloud computing. He is involved in the operation of the Ericsson Research Data Center and works with industrial cloud applications.

Control systems are increasingly connected to the cloud to access compute and storage services, as well as advanced AI functionality. Since wireless connectivity and remote services are inherently unreliable, control systems must be designed to be robust, accommodating variations in latency and availability of remote services. Furthermore, resource orchestration—that is, determining which control system gets access to which resources—becomes complex as the number of devices and the network's size expand. This talk will address the challenges and research opportunities for wireless mobile real-time control systems.

Rasmus Tammia is the program manager for AI in Mining at Boliden. After obtaining a M.Sc. in Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering from Linköping University, Rasmus developed advanced control algorithms for Scania’s biogas engines. Since 2019, he has been a part of Boliden’s team that develops state-of-the-art solutions for process control.

The session will focus on how the idea of Boliden Edge Lab came to be and why it was a necessary step for Boliden in order to accelerate their digitalization journey to be able to support R&D activities within AI for process control and mine automation applications.

Nikolaj Marchenko is a researcher at Robert Bosch GmbH in Stuttgart, Germany, where he works on the topics of future wireless networking technologies for industrial automation and automotive domains, with particular focus on cross-layer optimization and co-design. Nikolaj received his PhD in Information Technology from Klagenfurt University, Austria, and his Diploma Degree in Computer Engineering from RWTH Aachen University, Germany

Use cases such as AGVs, automated connected vehicles, or robots, where the control logic is offloaded to the edge/cloud computing via wireless networks, have been envisioned in the technical community for quite some time now. 3GPP specified 5G URLLC with a target on low latency and high reliability, and there are ongoing activities to improve latency and reliability on the networking side. However, achieving very stringent deterministic requirements in wireless networks can be very complex, and, therefore, costly, which obviously does not help their practical adoption. In this talk we will look into the spectrum of networked control systems in automotive and industrial domains, and discuss the opportunities and challenges for network-to-application and application-to-network interfaces, required  for the next generation of wireless systems.

Katrin Sjöberg is a technical adviser at Volvo Autonomous Solutions (V.A.S.) in Sweden, entailing involvement in research to final product with focus on frequency spectrum, standardization, and regulation related to wireless connectivity for Volvo products. Since 2009, she has been active in ETSI standardization on intelligent transport system (ITS), where she currently leads the standardization work as chair of ETSI TC ITS WG4 and TC ERM TG37. In addition, she is active in the trade association for European automotive manufacturers ACEA in CCAM topics, and represents ACEA’s interests in the EC EG-RE (Expert Group on Radio Equipment), European ITS Advisory Group, and in CEPT/ECC/WG FM. She also is a senior editor for the IEEE Vehicular Technology Magazine since 2020, writing columns about connected and automated driving. Katrin holds a PhD from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden.

This presentation will provide a glimpse into how the automotive industry is working with wireless connectivity for automated vehicles and machines on public roads as well as in confined areas. How is the wireless connectivity used? What are the challenges and opportunities? What are the differences between public road and confined areas?  And last but not least, the complexity involved in moving from research to industrialization.