Industry 5.0 envisions close cooperation between humans and machines requiring ultra-reliable and low latency communications (URLLC). The Intelligent Reflecting Surface (IRS) has the potential to play a crucial role in realizing wireless URLLC for Industry 5.0. IRS is forecast to be a key enabler of 6G wireless communication networks as it can significantly improve wireless network performance by creating a controllable radio environment. In this paper, we first provide an overview of IRS technology and then conceptualize the potential for IRS implementation in a future smart manufacturing environment to support the emergence of Industry 5.0 with a series of applications. Finally, to stimulate future research in this area, we discuss the strength, open challenges, and opportunities of IRS technology in modern smart manufacturing.
Smart manufacturing is a vision and major driver for change in today’s industry. The goal of smart manufacturing is to optimize manufacturing processes through constantly monitoring, controlling, and adapting processes towards more efficient and personalised manufacturing. This requires and relies on technologies for connected machines incorporating a variety of computation, sensing, actuation, and machine to machine communications modalities. As such, understanding the change towards smart manufacturing requires knowledge of the enabling technologies, their applications in real world scenarios and the communication protocols and their performance to meet application requirements. Particularly, wireless communication is becoming an integral part of modern smart manufacturing and is expected to play an important role in achieving the goals of smart manufacturing. This paper presents an extensive review of wireless communication protocols currently applied in manufacturing environments and provides a comprehensive review of the associated use cases whilst defining their expected impact on the future of smart manufacturing. Based on the review, we point out a number of open challenges and directions for future research in wireless communication technologies for smart manufacturing.
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