Remote-Timber: An Outlook for Teleoperated Forestry With First 5G Measurements

Across all industries, digitalization and automation are on the rise under the Industry 4.0 vision, and the forest industry is no exception. The forest industry depends on distributed flows of raw materials to the industry through various phases, wherein the typical workflow of timber loading and offloading is finding traction in using automation and 5G wireless networking technologies to enhance efficiency and reduce cost. This article presents one such ongoing effort in Sweden, Remote-Timber—demonstrating a 5G-connected teleoperation use-case within a workflow of timber terminal—and disseminates its business attractiveness as well as first measurement results on network performance. Also, it outlines the future needs of the 5G network design/optimization from teleoperation perspective. Overall, the motivation of this article is to disseminate our early-stage findings and reflections to the industrial and academic communities for furthering the research and development activities in enhancing 5G networks for verticals.