Formation Control of Automated Guided Vehicles in the Presence of Packet Loss.

This paper presents the formation tracking problem for non-holonomic automated guided vehicles. Specifically, we focus on a decentralized leader-follower approach using linear quadratic regulator control. We study the impact of communication packet loss-containing the position of the leader-on the performance of the presented formation control scheme. The simulation results indicate that packet loss degrades the formation control performance. In order to improve the control performance under packet loss, we propose the use of a long short-term memory neural network to predict the position of the leader by the followers in the event of packet loss. The proposed scheme is compared with two other prediction methods, namely, memory consensus protocol and gated recurrent unit. The simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of the long short-term memory in packet loss compensation in comparison with memory consensus protocol and gated recurrent unit.

Wireless Communications for Smart Manufacturing and Industrial IoT: Existing Technologies, 5G and Beyond.

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.