  Smart manufacturing aims to overcome the limitations of today's rigid
assembly lines by making the material flow and manufacturing process more
flexible, versatile, and scalable. The main economic drivers are higher
resource and cost efficiency as the manufacturers can more quickly adapt to
changing market needs and also increase the lifespan of their production sites.
The ability to close feedback loops fast and reliably over long distances among
mobile robots, remote sensors, and human operators is a key enabler for smart
manufacturing. Thus, this article provides a perspective on control and
coordination over wireless networks. Based on an analysis of real-world use
cases, we identify the main technical challenges that need to be solved to
close the large gap between the current state of the art in industry and the
vision of smart manufacturing. We discuss to what extent existing
control-over-wireless solutions in the literature address those challenges,
including our own approach toward a tight integration of control and wireless
communication. In addition to a theoretical analysis of closed-loop stability,
practical experiments on a cyber-physical testbed demonstrate that our approach
supports relevant smart manufacturing scenarios. The article concludes with a
discussion of open challenges and future research directions.
