Orange Belgium to deploy private 5G for industry drones and robotics and VR

Orange Belgium is boosting its private 5G deployments to help support VR, drones and robotics use cases in industry.

The French telecoms firm is deploying 5G in shipping ports and factories to help reduce carbon footprint and allow inspectors to work remotely with the help of robots and virtual reality.

Belgian ship management company Seafar will be using Orange’s private 5G in order to help captains control unmanned vessels remotely by using connected 360 cameras to link up to virtual reality headsets.

Within its control centre in Antwerp, the ship management firm currently control its vessels remotely by using footage sent from their cameras via 4G.

With the upgrade to the 5G network, Seafar will be able to deploy the 360 cameras with high image quality that will allow captains in the control centre to experience the ships through virtual reality headsets.

Lower latencies offered by 5G will enable ships to respond faster and easier to the captain’s commands from distances as far as 100km away.

This capability is augmented by network slicing – which means the ship will have access to its own network “highway” instead of using saturated 4G frequencies or public networks.

“We really see this project as a game changer,” says Ghazaleh Kia, R&D project manager at Seafar. “Thanks to 5G, we can have even more unmanned inland shipping vessels, which will cut costs, make the use of the vessels more efficient and reduce carbon emissions.”

Orange Belgium is also deploying 5G to help the inspections of Industrial sites, tank terminals, container terminals, and infrastructure thanks to the use of drones for robotics inspections.

The Antwerp-based firm, SkyeBase, has already deployed automated drones and robotics for its inspections, however, the process still involves manual tasks such as a need to remove the SD card from the drones in order to see the footage it has taken on a desktop or laptop.

With this, if a report turns out to be incomplete, the drone operator would have to travel back to site to repeat the inspection.

With standalone 5G, the drone can automatically upload footage straight to the inspector.

The brand also wants to simplify remote communication with experts, Tom Daniëls, co-founder and CIO of SkyeBase, explains: “Experts cannot always be on-site, but a live stream allows them to follow an inspection from a distance and share their knowledge in a secure manner. The 5G standalone network ensures a guaranteed bandwidth, which is crucial for connection reliability”

“We inspect critical infrastructure in the port and the petrochemical industry, amongst other locations. It is therefore crucial that the expert receives real-time footage, especially when an incident occurs.”

Similarly, telecoms firm Ericsson partnered with Telia earlier this year to build a private 5G network in order to help monitor and manage numerous devices in factories through sensors.