How 5G can enable drones to perform key tasks

Multinational operator Telefónica and tech company Unmanned Life are trialling the use of 5G-enabled drones for automated inventory management in a demo centre in Madrid. The 5G connected drones are conducting automatic stock takes and performing other intricate tasks in a space-constrained indoor environment.

Following a pre-planned route, these autonomous drones fly around the racks inside the warehouse or depot. As they do so, they use 5G to stream live video of the stock to an edge computing facility, which then uses image recognition software to update the inventory list in real-time. The drone also uses 5G to relay the precise location of each stock item.

As they are flying inside, the drones need to be small, limiting the space for onboard computational power. “This is where the low latency of the network comes into play,” says Kim Clement, CTO of Unmanned Life. With the edge facility handling the key computational tasks, the drone itself can be lightweight, compact and agile.

“These devices don’t even have a GPU, so there’s no possibility of doing analytics, so you need more computational power, you need graphical power,” explains Kim Clement."On small drones, battery life is also quite limited. Payload capacity is quite limited, and you want to reduce as much as possible the weight burden of a companion computer."

The highly responsive 5G network can also be used to quickly abort a mission in the event of a problem. Unmanned Life combines the drones’ in-built safety systems, such as collision avoidance, with its own control and localisation software to make autonomous drone flights safer. The solution has several integrated safety measures, including kill-switches in the event of a malfunction. Staff are protected by a physical security net and, even though the trial isn’t in a public environment, Telefónica doesn’t store the video footage to ensure that individuals’ privacy is preserved.

For the trials, Telefónica is using a hybrid-edge solution, combining on-site computing capacity with computing capacity at the edge of its public 5G network to deploy Unmanned Life´s drone management platform. Ultimately, Telefónica plans to move the platform solution entirely to the public 5G network edge, as that will give it greater scalability and flexibility.

As well as offering private networks, Telefónica could provide dedicated APNs in the public network. The operator plans to begin exploring potential solutions with a select group of customers this year, as a precursor to rolling out an actual commercial product. Unmanned Life stresses that autonomous drones can be applied to all manner of application scenarios, opening up broad possibilities as industry looks to automate more processes.

It intends its platform to be used to support the integration and orchestration of different types of robots, as well as drones. The goal is to support a broad set of use cases including logistics, industrial surveillance, smart factories, inspections, maintenance, surveillance, emergency response, infrastructure inspection, traffic management and crowd control. Unmanned Life is already developing an “outdoor drone swarm” solution . “The real power is in the interaction between the different modules we deploy on the edge, and on the device,” says Kim Clement. “We are paving the road towards even more exciting use cases in the future. And here we have done it in the ecosystem of an inventory management solution.”

The advent of so-called standalone 5G networks could further improve the connectivity available to drones. As well as lowering latency further still, a 5G core network can be configured to provide a specific application, such as a swarm of drones, with a dedicated slice of connectivity. Such a slice could offer a specific quality of service tailored to the use case. “We are working on the slicing,” says David Moro. “It’s going to be pretty much fundamental to separate traffic, I think. So, slicing definitely is going to be important for this kind of use case.”

As operators deploy 5G core networks, they should also be able to expose further network capabilities via application programming interfaces (APIs). These APIs will support the concept of a network-as-a-service, which could enable an enterprise to quickly customise the connectivity for a specific use case. In future, that could mean harnessing 5G connectivity is as simple and straightforward as running a software application in the cloud.