Since the announcement of quitting its luminaires business and transforming into a high-tech company, Osram has cooperated with various industry partners and focused on intelligent business. Testing autonomous materials handling at its own plant in Schwabmünchen is another move which indicates Osram’s commitment.

OSRAM and Deutsche Telekom have set up a joint innovation project for smart production to use autonomous transport systems within a more flexible production environment. In the project, the two companies will prototype and test a separate network infrastructure based on a dual slice Campus Network solution. The solution combines and integrates public and private LTE connectivity. With the deployment of local Edge Cloud, the complex computing processes will be transferred to a server within the factory which enables fast data processing. Osram is going to test transporting materials with autonomous vehicles with the support of AI and the dual slice Campus Network. Through the testing process they will get a better understanding of the production environment in the OSRAM factory.

(Image: Osram)

An automation solution for automated guided vehicles was developed by Gestalt Robotics, InSystems Automation and Fraunhofer Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology. The AGV scans the environment in the plant with the help of sensors, then transfers the collected environmental data via Campus Network to an Edge Cloud. Complex algorithms transform them into control data. The interaction of LTE, Edge-Cloud and Artificial Intelligence guarantees the real time processing. This allows the autonomous control of the transport system in the company area.

“For efficient production processes, speed and flexibility of our devices are highly important. The project of the integrated campus solution offers us the possibility to test how we can develop and optimize that by new technologies in the future”, says Hans-Joachim Schwabe, CEO OSRAM Specialty Lighting.