Airtel and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) today announced a partnership to test innovative use cases from TCS’ Neural Manufacturing solutions suite on Airtel’s ultra-fast and low latency 5G network. This comes after last month’s roll out of Airtel’s 5G for Business initiative to demonstrate a wide range of enterprise grade use cases using high-speed and low latency networks.
Airtel and TCS have partnered to test 5G based use cases from TCS’s Neural Manufacturing suite of solutions. Airtel said that the solutions help manufacturers build smart, cognitive factories which mimic resilient and adaptive behaviours as well as enable remote robotic operations in potentially hazardous environments like mining, Chemical plants and Oil & Gas fields to safeguard human capital.
They leverage the ultra-reliable low latency communication, enhanced bandwidth, and high device density characteristics of 5G networks and the combinatorial power of emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, computer vision, industrial robotics and Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality to enable autonomous actions.
TCS said that it has successfully tested two use cases on Airtel’s 5G testbed – remote robotics operations, and vision-based quality inspection, demonstrating how TCS’ Neural Manufacturing solutions and 5G technology can transform industrial operations, and significantly boost quality, productivity and safety. The demonstration was done at Airtel’s 5G Lab in Manesar (Gurgaon).
Airtel demonstrated India’s first 5G experience over a live 4G network earlier this year. It also demonstrated India’s first rural 5G trial, and conducted India’s first 5G trial in the 700MHz band with Nokia in the past few months.
Commenting on the demo in partnership with TCS, Randeep Sekhon, CTO – Bharti Airtel, said:
Airtel is spearheading 5G in India. The 5G ecosystem will open limitless possibilities for enterprises to enhance productivity and serve their customers even better with digitally enabled applications. We are delighted to work with TCS as our strategic technology partner to start testing real life 5G applications of the future. This also offers tremendous learnings across the value chain and lays a solid foundation for future application roadmap.
Susheel Vasudevan, Global Head of Manufacturing & Utilities at TCS, said:
We believe the future of manufacturing is neural, and have been making sustained investments in research, and innovation, and in building intellectual property. We will continue to build new, differentiated capabilities into TCS’ Neural Manufacturing suite of solutions, harnessing the power of machine vision, machine intelligence and 5G to reimagine and redefine the way smart factories operate. Our partnership with Airtel to deploy and validate these innovative use cases on their 5G network serves as a proof point of the transformative power of these technologies.