The renewed focus on reliability is motivated by emerging applications. Imagine a wireless factory robot in a situation where a worker suddenly steps in front of it and the robot needs to make an immediate decision.
This example is a real WTF. I really hope nobody is planning on building safety-critical real-time systems on top of WiFi!
I don’t know about manufacturing environments but I deal with laboratories a lot, and I’m a bit baffled at how quickly lab operators have jumped on battery-operated wifi sensors for lab monitoring systems. I have like three room sensors attached to my EcoBee thermostat at home and I can barely be assed to change the batteries in those things, I cannot imagine dealing with batteries and connectivity troubleshooting for a building full of sensors whose reliable operation is often critical for regulatory compliance. Seems like the perfect application for PoE systems, to me
In industrial there are very few wireless systems unless they are either too remote from the CPU and aren’t safety sensitive. Safety is taken very seriously because any incident can mean injuries/death and ending up in the public eye. Any safety systems are hard wired because of reliability.
If your robot moves around, then it needs a wireless connection. And it doesn’t really get any more reliable than wifi. I’m certainly not going to outsource that to a Verizon cellular connection.
And even for things that can be wired - ethernet is far from reliable. Cables are easily damaged or simply unplugged.
Wifi can work really well, especially with high end networking gear (and not, for example, the wifi access point you get for free from Verizon).
Anything automated that could be a threat needs to have safeguards. Needing constant wifi to prevent death or injury is not an acceptable safeguard.
Consider consumer/professional drones. If they lose connection they have on board protocols to mitigate hazards. Even then they are still governed by laws to isolate then from people because even those safeguards aren’t good enough. Suggesting that a robot could completely rely on wifi is preposterous.
As someone using various wireless standards over over twenty years and in IT dealing with wifi instability on basically a daily basis. No.
Wifi is a series of compromises to be convenient. It’s “good enough” for most of those but generally and increasingly in newer standards, the compromise is to drop stability for things speed. You’ll see this to be the case in a lot of professional wifi gear that will transfer you to a lower standard if it sees weaker signals to improve stability.
To make that concrete, a problem with wifi in an office is an embarrassing “I’ll call back on my phone” but a factory floor that could be millions of dollars of downtime to restart an entire chain of machines. Hardened industrial wiring and connections is well established and wifi is just not at that level. The poorly formed example of the robot was trying to convey their intention to start addressing that level of hardening.
All that said, based on my experience reading ieee articles this is all exaggerated. in reality we’re probably just getting more stable video calls at higher bandwidths. Still a win for the help desk techs everywhere and people with a heavy wall making Netflix flaky.
As long as they have a delay counter which immediately shuts the robot down when it hasn’t been answered within a certain time period it shouldn’t pose much of a problem if it has an E stop. Just inconvenient when it keeps shutting down all day.
I work in autonomous vehicle engineering. That’s not even on the table for something we’d consider doing. But China is trying to enter the market hard, and I am less sure they wouldnt do that.
This example is a real WTF. I really hope nobody is planning on building safety-critical real-time systems on top of WiFi!
I imagine many already exist. But the system should be designed to fail safe with WiFi in mind.
I don’t know about manufacturing environments but I deal with laboratories a lot, and I’m a bit baffled at how quickly lab operators have jumped on battery-operated wifi sensors for lab monitoring systems. I have like three room sensors attached to my EcoBee thermostat at home and I can barely be assed to change the batteries in those things, I cannot imagine dealing with batteries and connectivity troubleshooting for a building full of sensors whose reliable operation is often critical for regulatory compliance. Seems like the perfect application for PoE systems, to me
In industrial there are very few wireless systems unless they are either too remote from the CPU and aren’t safety sensitive. Safety is taken very seriously because any incident can mean injuries/death and ending up in the public eye. Any safety systems are hard wired because of reliability.
as a software developer, that example screams bad design
It screams “live service”
It also reflects something probably half the industry would push for since they can monetize it.
Are you new to the planet? Let me tell you about this thing we have called capitalism…
If your robot moves around, then it needs a wireless connection. And it doesn’t really get any more reliable than wifi. I’m certainly not going to outsource that to a Verizon cellular connection.
And even for things that can be wired - ethernet is far from reliable. Cables are easily damaged or simply unplugged.
Wifi can work really well, especially with high end networking gear (and not, for example, the wifi access point you get for free from Verizon).
I think you’ve missed the point.
Anything automated that could be a threat needs to have safeguards. Needing constant wifi to prevent death or injury is not an acceptable safeguard.
Consider consumer/professional drones. If they lose connection they have on board protocols to mitigate hazards. Even then they are still governed by laws to isolate then from people because even those safeguards aren’t good enough. Suggesting that a robot could completely rely on wifi is preposterous.
I think the point is that that sort of safety critical stuff should be on board, not relying on a wireless connection.
Yesh it should be self contained. Although to be fair there shouldn’t be a way for a human to be there to begin with.
As someone using various wireless standards over over twenty years and in IT dealing with wifi instability on basically a daily basis. No.
Wifi is a series of compromises to be convenient. It’s “good enough” for most of those but generally and increasingly in newer standards, the compromise is to drop stability for things speed. You’ll see this to be the case in a lot of professional wifi gear that will transfer you to a lower standard if it sees weaker signals to improve stability.
To make that concrete, a problem with wifi in an office is an embarrassing “I’ll call back on my phone” but a factory floor that could be millions of dollars of downtime to restart an entire chain of machines. Hardened industrial wiring and connections is well established and wifi is just not at that level. The poorly formed example of the robot was trying to convey their intention to start addressing that level of hardening.
All that said, based on my experience reading ieee articles this is all exaggerated. in reality we’re probably just getting more stable video calls at higher bandwidths. Still a win for the help desk techs everywhere and people with a heavy wall making Netflix flaky.
Better hope staff don’t Microwave their lunch at the wrong time….
As long as they have a delay counter which immediately shuts the robot down when it hasn’t been answered within a certain time period it shouldn’t pose much of a problem if it has an E stop. Just inconvenient when it keeps shutting down all day.
This sounds like they’re talking about something specific. There was a guy that was picked up/crushed by a robot recently that is eerily similar.
I work in autonomous vehicle engineering. That’s not even on the table for something we’d consider doing. But China is trying to enter the market hard, and I am less sure they wouldnt do that.
You could safely bet somebody already does