Beam-Steered Optical Wireless Communication for Industry 4.0

By means of narrow 2D-steerable infrared beams, interference-free individual wireless connections to densely-spaced devices in industry 4.0 settings can be made. Beam steering by fiber-fed passive diffractive beam steering modules and wavelength-tunable transceivers located in a separate controller location enable readily scalable connectivity to many devices and their nomadic mobility. To accommodate the dynamics in industry 4.0 settings, self-calibrating localization of the devices by means of retro-reflecting corner cube foils and beam scanning is demonstrated, and a low-complexity broadband wide field-of-view optical wireless receiver is presented, based on a matrix of photodiodes.