5G-ERA (5G Enhanced Robot Autonomy), aims alongside all other ICT-41 projects to provide an enhanced 5G experimentation facility and relevant Network Applications (NetApps) for 3rd party application developers so as to provide them with a 5G experimentation playground to test and qualify their applications. 5G-ERA addresses the new challenges on experimental facilities for the vertical developers and designers in the field of robotic applications through the following activities:

1. integrating operational processes of essential autonomous robotic capabilities into Open Source MANO (OSM), ensuring the vertical specific adaptation of existing experimentation facilities,
2. realising an intent-based networking paradigm by aligning the end-to-end (E2E) resource optimisation with the autonomous operations, ensuring effective policy to be designed
3. Cloud native Network Services (NSs) on the experimental facilities will create, ensuring robotic applications exploiting Network Functions Visualization/Software Defined Networking (NFV/SDN) infrastructures efficiently,
4. extending the experimentation facilities into robotic domains thorough standard Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) under Robot Operating System (ROS), prompting third-parties’ experimentation activities as well as engagement from new players.

Robot autonomy is essential for many 5G vertical sectors and can provide multiple benefits in automated mobility, Industry 4.0 and healthcare. 5G technology, on the other hand, has the great potential to enhance the robot autonomy.

Use cases from four vertical sectors, namely public protection and disaster relief (PPDR), transport, healthcare and manufacturing will be validated in the project by rapid prototyping of NetApp solutions and enhanced vertical experiences on autonomy. These case studies can be regarded as showcases of the potential of 5G and 5G-ERA to the acceleration of the ongoing convergence of robotics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and cloud computing; and to unlock a next level of autonomy through 5G based learning in general.