Interoperable Teleoperation of Mobile Robots in Intralogistics: Joint Paper Demonstrates End-to-End Network Co-Design for Smart Industries

Researchers from the ComNets at TU Dortmund, the Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics (IML), TU Hamburg, and Westphalian University of Applied Sciences, have published a joint paper demonstrating how teleoperation of mobile robots can be seamlessly and interoperably integrated into modern smart factory 6G environments, from the application protocol down to the wireless radio link.

Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) and Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) are at the heart of today's smart intralogistics operations. Yet even the most advanced autonomous systems occasionally encounter situations they cannot resolve on their own: a blocked path, an unexpected obstacle, or a navigation failure in a dynamic shopfloor environment. In these rare but critical moments, human intervention is essential to maintain operational flow and safety. To address this challenge, we developed a VDA 5050 teleoperation extension that enables a human operator to take remote control of a mobile robot directly through the same standardized Fleet Management System (FMS) interface used for autonomous coordination. VDA 5050 is the established, vendor-neutral communication standard for mixed-fleet operation in intralogistics, and this brings teleoperation natively into this framework, rather than as a proprietary, robot-specific add-on.
What distinguishes this collaboration is its end-to-end perspective, jointly designed across the full communication stack: from the VDA 5050 application layer, through middleware transport, all the way down to the Open Radio Access Network (Open RAN) wireless link. We deployed a full-stack Open RAN network, providing a highly reproducible virtual-radio testbed as well as a real-world over-the-air validation setup. This approach supports the broader research agenda on Open RAN as a flexible platform for use-case-specific 6G innovations in industrial environments.
 

The VDA 5050 Traffic Generator developed as part of this work is publicly available on GitHub:  https://github.com/tudo-cni/VDA-5050-Traffic-Generator

Presented Manuscript:
N. A. Wagner, L. Toenning, D. Lünsch, J. Jost, C. Wietfeld, and P. Detzner, "Teleoperating Mobile Robots via VDA 5050 – A First Middleware Evaluation within Open Industrial Networks," in IEEE International Conference on Factory Communication Systems (WFCS), Offenburg, Germany, April 2026. [pdf] [Code] [Details]

Acknowledgment:
This work was partially supported by the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR) via the 6GEM+ transfer hub (funding reference 16KIS2412).