PRIME-6G (Pilot for Resilient Industrial Manufacturing Environments with 6G Technologies), a EUR 7.76 million project funded by the European Union under the Horizon Europe programme through the Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaking (SNS JU), has officially launched. This pioneering initiative, with the participation of IMDEA Networks, aims to bring next-generation 6G technologies into real industrial manufacturing environments, laying the foundation for a new generation of intelligent industrial manufacturing.

Factories are constantly evolving, but the pace and complexity of this transformation are increasing rapidly. Legacy infrastructure, fragmented systems, and connectivity gaps are holding manufacturing environments back from their true potential.

PRIME-6G envisions a future where factories become fully interconnected, autonomous, and adaptive ecosystems powered by seamless 6G communication. By combining deterministic communications, industrial automation, and intelligent computing, the project is helping pave the way for more flexible, sustainable, and human-centric manufacturing that can respond in real time to operational challenges, production variability, and emerging market needs.

Over the next 30 months, PRIME-6G will develop an integrated, end-to-end sustainable platform based on a Cloud-Edge Continuum, enabling seamless and agile service provisioning across smart manufacturing environments. The platform combines 6G connectivity, AI-driven optimisation, cloud-edge computing, robotics, and real-time sensing into a coherent system designed to operate reliably and efficiently.

Pilot demonstrations: from laboratory to factory floor

PRIME-6G’s development pathway is structured as a progression from controlled laboratory environments to a fully integrated real-world industrial demonstrator.

The project is structured around two complementary use cases, namely: AURORA (Advanced Unified Robotics Operations via Resilient Automation) and SENTINEL (Sensing-Enhanced Network Twin for Intelligent Environments in Manufacturing), whose key technologies will be developed and validated at Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs) 5-6 across two partner laboratories: NEXTONIC in Madrid and the Siemens AG facility in Munich, respectively.

AURORA investigates how deterministic 6G connectivity can reliably link virtualised robotic control systems with industrial robots, meeting the stringent latency and reliability requirements of real-time automation. It combines AI-driven network management, cobotic subnetworks, digital twins, and AI agents to optimise control placement and resource allocation, enabling more agile, autonomous, and scalable industrial operations.

“In PRIME-6G, IMDEA Networks leads the SENTINEL use case, in which we use 6G sensing to construct a real-time digital twin of the factory floor without dedicated sensor infrastructure. By reusing the existing communication network to sense the environment, we can substantially improve the safety and efficiency of human-robot collaboration in manufacturing. This is a clear example of how 6G moves beyond connectivity to become a key enabler of intelligent industrial systems,” explains Joerg Widmer, Research Director at IMDEA Networks and Principal Investigator of the project.

SENTINEL (Sensing-Enhanced Network Twin for Intelligent Environments in Manufacturing) leverages multi-sensor fusion to build real-time digital twins of dynamic industrial environments. By reusing existing 5G/6G infrastructure for continuous environmental monitoring, SENTINEL enhances situational awareness, improves robot coordination, and reduces the need for dedicated sensor hardware, delivering smarter, safer, and more efficient factory floors.

Together, AURORA and SENTINEL will be integrated into a unified TRL 6-7 platform at ARENA2036 in Stuttgart, one of Europe’s leading smart manufacturing research facilities, demonstrating how 6G-enabled autonomous logistics and real-time environmental sensing can operate as a single, coherent system in a real industrial setting.

PRIME-6G brings together a diverse Consortium of 13 partners from six European countries, combining expertise in telecommunications, industrial automation, artificial intelligence, robotics, and research.

The Consortium is coordinated by Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (Spain) and includes ARENA2036 e.V. (Germany), AUSTRALO (Estonia), Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (Spain), Fivecomm (Spain), IMDEA Networks (Spain), InCites Consulting (Luxembourg), Nokia (Hungary), Robotnik Automation (Spain), Siemens AG (Germany), Telefónica (Spain), The Laude Technology Company (Spain), and the University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands).