The promise that 5G allied with AI, and especially machine learning, would transform robotics has inevitably led to some disillusionment, but there are nonetheless examples of significant progress. It is more realistic to regard 5G as accelerating progress towards mobile, autonomous and reconfigurable robots, in a journey that certainly began with LTE and has a long way to go. The benefits of faster, higher capacity, more robust and lower latency wireless communications opened the door to mobile high-performance robots able to benefit from levels of computation that would not be possible onboard. This embraces mobile ground-based and airborne robots, overlapping with drones, able to perform feats of navigation, manipulation and control beyond the current generation. It also means that cables…