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Starting signal for the EU project 6G-SKY – kick-off meeting in Ottobrunn|Munich

Furnitz, 19.05.2022. Last week the Kick-Off meeting of the CELTIC-NEXT Project 6G-SKY took place. The European project partners met at the Headquarters of the project coordinator and partners site Airbus Defence and Space in Ottobrunn, Germany.

What is the project all about and why 6G?

The CELTIC-NEXT project 6G-SKY aims at the development of solutions to enable reliable and robust connectivity for aerial and ground users via flexible and adaptive 6G multi-layer architecture adopting multiple technologies such as satellite and direct air to ground communication. The project started in May this year and will be finalised in April 2025. The project budget is worth € 9 m and involves approx. 60 person years!

The project is supported and funded by 4 countries: Austria, Germany, Hungary and Sweden and involves 17 prestigious and well-known innovative companies, start-ups and research institutions and universities like Airbus (also coordinator) from Germany, KTH Royal Institute of Technology from Sweden (also technical coordinator), SAS, Ericsson, Deutsche Telekom, Fraunhofer as well as the Carinthian research institution Lakeside Labs and the location development agency LCA Logistik Center Austria Süd, just to name a few.

Short project abstract:

6G-SKY aims at the development of solutions to enable reliable and robust connectivity for aerial and ground users via flexible and adaptive network architecture adopting multiple technologies such as satellite and direct air to ground communication. In addition, the project focuses on novel wireless network design and management schemes in 3-dimensional (3D) space including different types of flying vehicles with their unique requirements. Another focus is to provide robust, low latency and/or high-capacity communications to ground users in the rural areas without any infrastructure via non terrestrial networks (NTNs). As an application partner, LCA Logistik Center Austria Süd (LCAS) contributes a concrete use case for the mobility of goods.

 

More project details and goals:

The Celtic project addresses dynamic communication architectures for future connectivity also in rural and alpine areas for a range of industrial, mobility, transport, logistics and agricultural applications. The project focuses on the networking of rail and road-based (pre-carriage and on-carriage) freight mobility as an application of the novel 6G-SKY architecture. 6G-SKY thus becomes the basis for a consistent IT-supported booking and processing system.
6G-SKY aims to develop technologies that enable autonomous and networked transport (rail/road) in the goods sector and thus CO2-efficient and climate-neutral autonomous goods mobility via cross-modal optimization. The main goal is proof-of-concept (PoC) tests and demonstrations of the 6G-SKY architecture in a concrete use case of goods mobility with the result of a concept and a roadmap for the real implementation.
The sub-goals include swarm coordination, which enables the implementation of autonomous and adaptive swarm behavior, cooperative intelligence and coordination of the UAVs for communication coverage, for sensing tasks or traffic status. Furthermore, information for the coordination of freight traffic should be obtained from this, which will be used to optimize routes/scheduling, for example. The central control is the basis for an IT-supported booking platform in which the coordination of the transport system takes place.

As an application partner, LCA Logistik Center Austria Süd (LCAS) contributes a concrete use case for the mobility of goods.  LCAS combines logistics-related services with terminal services and intermodal transport concepts. The use case is the coordination of the pre-carriage and on-carriage to the rail in the the Carinthian logistics hub, which also provides for autonomous means of transport between two main areas of the hub.

More information can be found here: https://www.celticnext.eu/project-6g-sky/