Flexible factory automation: Potentials of contactless transmission systems, combining state-of-the-art technologies

The reduction of wires and connections is a fundamental necessity for upcoming industrial 4.0 solutions, requiring a large amount of reconfigurability and flexibility. Our research focuses on recent ways of combining energy and data transmission in single contactless transducers, enabling easy installation, maintenance and possible fulfilment of high protection classes. While this approach can typically be solved by combining Wifi and inductive energy transfer, the Wifi aspect is often limited by the available media access and channel occupation. Another issue is the real time capability of Wifi or other wireless transmission protocols like IEEE 802.15.4. While creating a new wireless or contactless standard is beyond the focus of this work, we concentrate on combining existing technologies and their interoperability. This includes powerline communication systems, near field data transmission and inductive energy transfer mechanisms.