Ford updates 5G roll out in the UK with Vodafone
Vodafone has installed a private 5G network at one of Ford Motor’s electric vehicle plants in the UK. With the help of government backing and a consortium of other providers, the two companies are hoping to demonstrate how useful 5G can be in a manufacturing plant. Last month the two gave an update on progress in an interview with BloombergTV.
The principal focus for the trial is improving connectivity for welding machines. These are used extensively in electric vehicle manufacture, joining the hundreds of thousands of circuits needed to make up a car. Ford is using laser welding in its plant, which is groundbreaking but which also creates its own problems: there are only a handful of engineers with laser welding expertise, and to build electric cars at volume needs that expertise needs to be present on the factory floor. Ford is using 5G to hook up its assembly line with the Welding Institute in Cambridge, and engineers based there direct the team in Dunton using augmented reality helmets.
Ford is also using 5G for monitoring and ensuring quality control. Sensors gather data, store it in the cloud, and parse it using machine learning. The parsing is necessary because the high vision pictures of the circuitry are too complex for the human eye to sift effectively. Lancaster University is also involved in this aspect of the project, taking the data stored in the cloud and analyzing it.
For Ford, executives said that visibility into production is the largest benefit of 5G. Manufacturing is very complex, and the business pages of newspapers are full of car companies that mess up launches. All too often lack of data from the shop floor is what is behind a failed launch.
Vodafone meanwhile emphasized the collaborative nature of this project, which goes beyond Ford to an ecosystem of partners including the welding institute, research partners and parts makers. There is the partner ecosystem at one end, 5G in the middle and at the other end the commercial aspect: how to make the technology commercially viable. Vodafone said it wants to put together a reconfigurable set of solutions that will reduce price points. It is well aware that the cost of a 5G install is prohibitive for most. Vodafone’s challenge in addressing small to medium businesses in healthcare or manufacturing is that they need to have on offer is a library, a set of pre-made solutions. Hopefully, projects such as the one with Ford will result in these cost-effective products, reducing the barriers to entry.
Article Topics
5G | AR/VR | Ford Motor Company | Industry 4.0 | manufacturing | private wireless | Vodafone
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