From Industry 4.0 to Industry 5.0 in the Field of Autonomous Robots: Expectations, Telecommunications Operator Opportunities, and Security Challenges

Industry 4.0, expected to limit the burden of manual labor through the integration of cyber-physical systems, the Internet of Things (IoT), and machine learning methods, failed to meet social expectations. It started excluding humans from the production process. The next stage of the industrial revolution, Industry 5.0, reverses this trend by emphasizing the importance of human involvement and interaction in production processes. In this paper, we present the evolution of robotic systems, from those of Industry 4.0 to their humanized versions expected in Industry 5.0, with a particular emphasis on system cybersecurity. Moreover, we present the challenges and business opportunities that telecommunications operators face in implementing and operating robotic cyber-physical systems. We also analyze new security challenges arising from this transformation and the central role of humans in industrial processes. We illustrate the identified problems with a special case: Cobots.