IIoT Lab

Description

The Industrial IoT lab (IIoT Lab) is an advanced test environment created to accelerate R&D in production and warehousing IoT technology. The lab offers 300m2 of open experimentation space to foster regional and international co-operations in Industry 4.0 with a focus on smart and connected industries. Our research activities intersect robotics, machine learning, localization and wireless, and cloud computing.

Warehouse emulator

We offer a 240m2 representative warehouse environment where innovators can validate positioning solutions for drones, AGVs and other mobile technologies. The ceiling above provides railings with power and connectivity to integrate hardware and sensors. Two distinct spaces are available:

An open space of 6m (l) x 11m (w) x 2.5 m (h) for drone tests, navigation & VR experiments. An area with racks of 17m (l) x 11m (w) x 2.5 m (h) for warehousing scenarios.

Infrastructure and equipment

The IIoT Lab offers a wireless testbed for Industry 4.0 research and scenarios that is complemented with mobile robotics, from drones to AGVs, to support a wide range of industrial use cases. To validate indoor positioning experiments we offer a 100m2 mocap tracked mm-accurate ground truth area.

Ground Truth

18 Qualisys Miqus M3 motion capture (mocap) cameras are installed to provide mm-accurate ground truth measurements of any device under test in an area of 100m2. The presence of mm-level ground truth in between racks is unique in the world. This comprises the open space area and two hallways surrounded by racks. The device under test itself is fitted with passive infrared reflective mocap markers to allow for Six Degrees of Freedom (6DoF) tracking (x, y, z, yaw, pitch, roll) of the entire body even with multiple occlusions.

Wireless testbed

The ceiling of the IIoT lab adopts IDLab’s w-iLab.t wireless environment, equipped with multiple interfaces, including 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth, IoT sensor nodes with 802.15.4 interfaces, ultra-wideband (UWB) antennas and user-defined cognitive radios.

23 UWB anchor nodes are installed on the walls at various locations and can be controlled over w-iLab-t for wide-area indoor localization, drone flight or product tracking experiments.

Experimenters can determine which interfaces will be used, and what software is installed on the embedded nodes to orchestrate wireless performance across a large number of devices.

Mobile robotics

The IIoT Lab offers a range of drones and AGVs for experimentation and research. We have a certified drone pilot on staff with a lot of practical outdoor and indoor flight experience.

  • 1 x Turtlebot 3 AGV - equipped with mobile UWB tag
  • 2 x Turtlebot 4 AGV - equipped with LiDAR and Stereo camera
  • 1 x 4WD Rover Zero 3
  • 2 x Intel Aero Drone – equipped with mobile UWB tags, optical flow and altimeter LiDAR
  • 1 x DJI M100 Drone – equipped with Stereo and ultrasonic sensors and Intel NUC i7
  • 1 x DJI Mavic Air Drone
  • 3 x 3DR Solo Drone

Example use case

The video below shows some example uses cases conducted at the IIOT Lab.