Industrial Wireless Networks for Robot and Humanoid Control
Industrial robots have traditionally relied on wired control systems. This made sense when installations were static and enclosed in safety cages. Today, however, production environments are changing. Collaborative robots (cobots) increasingly work alongside human operators, and mobile robots are deployed where needed rather than tied to a single location.
Many manufacturing facilities operate in low-volume, high-variability or seasonal production modes. In these environments, production lines must be reconfigurable, and equipment must be moved or repurposed more frequently than in continuous high-volume manufacturing. This shift challenges the conventional assumption that robot control must be wired.
Cabling Costs and Practical Constraints
Adding or relocating a robot or machine is not a simple task. Cabling changes often require halting production, coordinating with safety procedures, and navigating around existing equipment and AMRs.
A study performed at Bosch Reutlingen showed that the cost of adding or moving network cabling for a single machine can reach €2.500, excluding the cost of downtime. In many factories, cabling work cannot be performed while robots or autonomous mobile robots are in operation, making reconfiguration even more disruptive.
Why Not Just Use Wi-Fi or 5G?
It is natural to ask why robots cannot simply use existing wireless technologies. The limitation is timing.
PLCs that control industrial robots typically operate with control loops of 10 ms or less, with strict requirements for jitter, determinism, and reliability. While Wi-Fi and 5G offer low average latency, their latency is not bounded. Occasional spikes due to interference, scheduling delays, or protocol behavior are unavoidable. For office applications, this is insignificant; for robot motion control, an unpredictable delay can halt a production line or create unsafe behavior.
As a result, conventional wireless technologies cannot currently satisfy the deterministic performance needed for closed-loop robot control.
Humanoid robots: An Even More Demanding Use Case
By the end of 2025, the first general-purpose humanoid robots are being introduced into industrial settings for testing and evaluation. Although they are pre-trained for a variety of tasks, they will still require extensive “on-the-job” training and troubleshooting.
In many scenarios, a remote human operator must temporarily take control of the humanoid to demonstrate a task or help it when it gets stuck. This process requires haptic feedback, allowing the operator to feel what the robot is sensing in real time. Such teleoperation demands extremely tight timing guarantees and very high reliability in both directions of communication.
This pushes networking requirements even further beyond what current wireless technologies can deliver.
"Better than Wired": Wireless Designed for Industrial Control
To support these new requirements, we have developed a wireless technology specifically engineered for deterministic industrial control. Unlike Wi-Fi or 5G, which provide low average latency but allow occasional high-latency events, this system offers:
Bounded latency, suitable for closed-loop robotic control
99.9999% packet delivery reliability
Deterministic performance even under interference and high network load
With deterministic wireless, production environments can become significantly more flexible. Robots, cobots, mobile platforms, and humanoids can be deployed, moved, or repurposed without the constraints of fixed cabling—while still meeting the stringent demands of industrial safety and control.
Do you want to know more?
Read more about our patented wireless technology on our technology page, or get in touch with us.