By Seung-min Jeon WIRED Korea

The coffee maker is grinding beans, and the toaster is browning slices of white bread when you are preparing to go to work in your room. You get on your car after a simple breakfast. As the autonomous car is driving you to the office, you may read news or listen to music on the way. The home appliances and the self-driving car are doing their job on their own.
 

This futuristic morning routine is not just what you see in a sci-fi movie. It will become a reality in the not-too-distant future, now that everything is connected to one another on the 5G networks. That is what domestic mobile network carriers are promising as they are improving and expanding their 5G services.

Indeed, one cutting-edge technology after another is being put into new devices or new services. One such example is an industrial robot that is capable of removing mechanical parts with defects from the assembly line. Used in the operation of the robot is a “multi-access edge computing” technology that is provided on a 5G network for speedy data processing.

This latest development was unimaginable a few years ago. The reason was that data transmissions were slow, latency in communications were irritable and connections was severely limited on the 4G LTE networks, as hindsight shows.

5G in industry

Experts say ultra-low latency counts more than ultra-high speed when it comes to the use of 5G technology in industry. If they fail to respond immediately to commands, automated machines and robots cannot be used on assembly lines or on construction sites. Controlling them without a hitch is made possible with ultra-low latency, which is measured at 1 millisecond on the 5G network, well below 10 milliseconds to 20 milliseconds on the LTE network.

A good example of control with ultra-low latency was the remote operation of an excavator by Doosan Infracore, a leading Korean machinery manufacturer, with the assistance of LG Uplus, a Korean mobile network operator.

In April, Doosan Infracore engineers at a 5G remote control station located in the compound of Bauma 2019, the world’s largest construction machinery trade fair held in Munich, Germany, could move around an excavator as they intended on a site in Incheon, Korea. Such elaborate machinery control over the inter-city distance of 8,500 ㎞ would not be made possible in the absence of 5G mobile network technology.

The successful demonstration followed a similar experiment by Doosan Infracore last year. The machinery manufacturer participating in a construction equipment fair in Shanghai, China, operated an excavator on a site in Incheon, with the distance between the two locations measured at 880 ㎞.

In the two instances, the engineers used a three-dimensional machine guidance solution to measure depth and width on the work site with sensors installed on the excavator and the telematics service to operate and monitor the construction equipment. They could confirm, on the imagery instantly delivered by the solution over the long distances, that the excavator was accurately responding to their command.

The key to the demonstrations was the technology of transmitting data with ultra-low latency, which was made available on LG Uplus’ 5G mobile network.

The use of 5G technology will undoubtedly accelerate on construction sites and factory assembly lines, where work processes are relatively simple. With work processes set up in advance and work environments easily put under control, experts say it will not be too difficult to design 5G-empowered machinery and robots for industrial use.

Robots in everyday life

One of the most notable changes to be brought to everyday life in Korea will be the ubiquity of robots. Robots, whose presence is now limited to factories, will find their way into airports and seaports in an intermediate phase and finally to homes, public places and roads, says Cho Jung-san, director for hydraulic robotics at the Institute of Industrial Technology.

It is an opinion shared by robotics researchers that 5G-driven innovations will be most notable in the category of moving robot, which include not only robots on caterpillar tracks but flying robots with propellers, such as drones, and self-driving robots, such as autonomous cars.

But no robot is drawing as much public attention as connected, autonomous cars, whose operation will be based on all kinds of cutting-edge technologies, ranging from artificial intelligence to the technology to connect a vehicle to almost every device, namely the vehicle to everything, also known as V2X.

The 5G mobile network will connect vehicles and all traffic devices installed on and along the roads for data transmissions at ultra-high speed and with ultra-low latency. In other words, gathered data will be instantaneously shared by all vehicles and all censors on the roads.

As an LG Uplus official explains, a 5G-supported autonomous vehicle running at the speed of 60 km per hour will roll a mere 0.5 km forward from the moment it recognizes an obstacle on its path --- one 10th of the distance that an LTE- supported autonomous vehicle would need before making a full stop under the same conditions.

A 5G-supported drone will be able to take 4K, 8K or higher-resolution pictures and send the images instantaneously, making it easier to identify animals, vehicles or boats in a target area. It can be used to help rescue people from disaster areas and deliver a package to a door with the margin of error in operation drastically reduced on the 5G mobile network.

Telemedicine not a mere dream

A team of medical doctors was shown to be removing a cancerous tumor from a patient’s colon in a Barcelona hospital on February 27. What was special about the operation was that the procedure was supervised by the head of the hospital’s gastrointestinal surgery unit in a location more than 5 km away from the hospital -- in the MWC 2019 compound. The head surgeon was using 5G technology to direct the operation via a live video link.

The operation was a demonstration of telemedicine, which can be replicated in Korea with 5G mobile networks in operation. Moreover, it is a matter of time before healthcare is brought home from the hospital in Korea.

Another development in the offing is the linking of everything electronic to everything else electronic, including home appliances, office equipment and factory machinery, via the Internet of Things. Then homes, offices, factories and even cities will turn smart.

Korean policymakers believe the Internet of Things will turn out to be a driving force behind a prosperous Korean economy. Among them is Vice Minister of Science and ICT Min Won-ki, who said, “The Internet of Things, together with the 5G mobile infrastructure, will bring out digital innovations in a variety sectors of our society.”

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The above is a translation of Seung-min Jeon’s Korean-language article by Nam-hyun Choi, deputy editor in chief at WIRED Korea.