What's up

Five years ago, it started with a network, the first private 5G network in Wallonia went live in our building, developed with Alstom, AGC and Multitel, and members came to test what it could carry, from a 5G antenna built into glass to the remote control of cranes and trucks.

Every test raised the next question. Once data travels, who captures it, who makes sense of it on the spot, and who lets the machine act on it? Around the network came sensors that see and listen, embedded electronics, vessels steered from a control center and satellites built for orbit, with Phoenix AI, Sphear, Multitel, Seafar, Thales Alenia Space and Aerospacelab.

That story is why Connected & Autonomous is one of the five thematics of our technological roadmap. It grew from our community, project after project, and the people who make it work are already under our roof.

For a long time the weakest link was the network. Wi-Fi drops out behind metal racks, cables cannot follow a crane or a boat, and public mobile networks were never designed for a production line. That is the layer A6K started with, and five years later it is also the one that has moved the most.

Five years of private 5G, and what it taught us

On October 28, 2021, the first private 5G network in Wallonia went live in our building, built and operated with Proximus. It was a demonstrator, but it was a real network, with its own core, its own radio and its own coverage, and members could use it for real tests.

For Alstom, one of the consortium members behind the lab, it offers a way to evaluate how to secure on-board train communications, while the railway sector moves towards FRMCS, the 5G-based successor to GSM-R. Glass maker AGC tested a 5G antenna integrated directly into glass, the kind of component a building or a vehicle would need. For Volvo, a robotic camera inspection was tested with Zeiss, and the RTBF used it to carry live production feeds during Viva for Life. In 2023, I-care, Multitel and Proximus used it for a predictive maintenance proof of concept, streaming vibration data from building equipment over 5G to detect faults before they happen. In 2024, the LUSTA project used the lab to prepare remote control of cranes and trucks over 5G, bringing together Multitel, Proximus, Seafar, Novandi and Logistics in Wallonia.

What those projects taught us is that connectivity on its own rarely convinces anyone. Plant managers do not buy bandwidth, they buy a crane that keeps moving when the operator sits two hundred meters away, or an inspection that no longer stops the line. The network matters because it removes the excuse not to try.

That is also why the lab is being upgraded this year. The next step is network slicing on a private network, where a single installation carries several logical networks side by side, each with its own guaranteed performance. Critical control loops no longer compete with a video feed or with office traffic. Slicing on a private network will be a first in Belgium, and it will be possible to test it here.

Sensing where cables cannot go

The network carries data, but something has to produce it, and increasingly that something also has to decide what is worth sending.

Phoenix AI built a vision demonstrator that is now installed in our building. Cameras spread across the site feed a compact box that analyses the images on the spot, without sending video to the cloud. It detects whether a person entering a zone is wearing a helmet, counts passages and raises an alert in real time, with anonymization switched on by default. The point is not the helmet. It is that the intelligence sits where the image is taken, which keeps latency low, keeps the images on site and keeps working when the connection does not.

Sphear, a start-up we support, works on a different sense altogether. Its acoustic sensors listen rather than look, and identify drones, vehicles or intrusions from the sound they make. Hearing works in the dark, around corners and through fog, which is exactly where cameras struggle.

Sensing does not always need electronics at the measuring point either. We recently told the story of a fiber optic demonstrator in which the cable itself becomes the sensor.

Research center covering the whole chain

Multitel joined our community in early 2020, and few members illustrate this theme as completely. Created in 1995 by the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Mons, the research center works on IoT and embedded electronics, network engineering, applied photonics and artificial intelligence. It designs electronic prototypes and embedded software, develops signal processing that turns raw sensor data into usable information, and advises companies on how to build and secure their networks.

Two of its capabilities matter in particular for anyone building connected products. Multitel is an independent accredited laboratory for ERTMS testing and certification, the European train control standard, which means it knows what it takes to prove that a connected system behaves safely. It has also invested in an anechoic chamber for EMC and radio pre-qualification, which companies can rent for a week to test and adjust a product before certification, so that it passes on the first attempt.

That is why Multitel shows up in so many of the projects mentioned here, from LUSTA to the automated navigation work described below.

Autonomy, from rivers to orbit

The last layer is the one that gets the headlines, the machine acting on its own. In our community it covers very different environments.

On the water, Seafar operates inland vessels remotely from a control center, and recently closed NavAuWall, a four-year project on automated navigation on Walloon waterways, with Multitel among its partners. In orbit, the challenge is that nobody can go and fix anything. Thales Alenia Space designs the on-board electronics that power satellites and launchers from Charleroi, and Aerospacelab is about to produce the satellites of IRIS², Europe's secure connectivity constellation, on an industrial scale.

Underneath all of this sit components most people never see. Estel, another start-up we support, produces in Wallonia the optical transceivers that move data through telecom networks and data centers. CETIC, an applied research center in our community, works on the software engineering of embedded and cyber physical systems, the code that has to keep running when nobody is watching.

Complementary by design, based on our community

None of these organizations covers everything alone, and that is the point of having them under one roof. Start-ups that build a sensor need a network to test it on, a research center to help certify it and an industrial partner to try it in real conditions. Here, those are a few corridors apart, next to a private 5G network that keeps evolving.

This article closes our series on the five thematics that structure innovation at A6K, after industrial performance, digital and intelligent, energy and power, and security and safety. If you are working on a connected or autonomous system and want to test it, or simply want to meet the people mentioned here, contact us!