In recent years, applying swarms of robots to industrial production has been gaining traction thanks to the fourth industrial revolution. It is motivated by the need for different industries to transition from linear and centralized production lines to more flexible arrangements that enable the re-organization of the production lines in a timely manner. It can be accomplished by introducing mobile robotic platforms interacting with each other. This interaction demands stringent communication requirements among robots to achieve the same levels of reliability as in current linear production, where wired connections are used to deliver the required performance.

These requirements include high throughput, low latency, and high reliability, such as 99.99% reliability for data transmissions of at least 10 Mbps data rate with a maximum of 10 ms latency. This research incorporates cooperative capabilities and well-known techniques to 5G NR sidelink mode 2 to efficiently fulfill the swarm production robot’s communication requirement.

The first part of the thesis addresses the proof of concept of integrating two different cooperative resource allocation schemes. In the second part of the thesis, the signaling design of each of the proposed schemes was studied to evaluate the impact of the signaling exchange on each scheme’s performance. The third part of the thesis includes the adoption of re-transmissions and link adaptation to reduce data half-duplex and different forms of interference.

Additionally, it studies the impact of spatial diversity when robots are equipped with directional antennas, producing beams selected for data transmission and/or reception. Based on the presented results, recommendations for indoor factory implementation are provided.