Wireless Networked Multirobot Systems in Smart Factories

| Smart manufacturing based on artificial intelligence and information communication technology will become the main contributor to the digital economy of the upcoming decades. In order to execute flexible production, smart manufacturing must holistically integrate wireless networking, computing, and automatic control technologies. This article discusses the challenges of this complex system engineering from a wireless networking perspective. Starting from enabling flexible reconfiguration of a smart factory, we discuss existing wireless technology and the trends of wireless networking evolution to facilitate multirobot smart factories. Furthermore, the special sequential decision-making of a multirobot manufacturing system is examined. Social learning can be used to extend the resilience of precision Manuscript received February 28, 2020; revised August 29, 2020; accepted October 7, 2020. The work of Kwang-Cheng Chen was supported in part by Cyber Florida. The work of Shih-Chun Lin was supported in part by the North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) under Award TCE2020-03, in part by the NC State 2019 Faculty Research and Professional Development Program, and in part by Cisco Systems, Inc. The work of Chun-Hung Liu was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant CNS-2006453 and in part by Mississippi State University under Grant ORED 253551-060702. The work of Andreas F. Molisch was supported in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and in part by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). (Corresponding author: Kwang-Cheng Chen.) Kwang-Cheng Chen is with the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL 33620 USA (e-mail: kwangcheng@usf.edu). Shih-Chun Lin is with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695 USA (e-mail: