Toward Haptic Communications Over the 5G Tactile Internet
Summary (3 min read)
Introduction
- And where the final published version is provided on the Research Portal, if citing you are again advised to check the publisher's website for any subsequent corrections.
- Applications which can tolerate delays over 1ms are within the scope of teleoperation ; a broad range of applications that can be divided into three categories of teleoperation, wherein each scenario is associated to a level of dynamics of the remote environment the user is interacting with and the corresponding delay tolerance.
- On the other hand, in this survey the authors focus on the efforts for haptic communication in networked teleoperation systems over the Tactile Internet and examine in detail the advancements in teleoperation over long distances.
- Moreover, Section VI presents the latest developments on 5G mobile infrastructure and technologies with focus on ultra-reliable low-latency communication as well as the main KPIs of various 5G use cases.
II. TELEOPERATION
- Multi-modal telepresence and teleaction (TPTA) systems for haptic telemanipulation, also known as telehaptic systems [10], usually consist of one human operator using a haptic interface (master device) on one end, a communication channel and one teleoperator (slave actuator) on the other end .
- The hardware design parameters of haptic devices (e.g. sampling frequency) and the number and type of sensors and actuators determine the amount of data the device will output or needs as input.
- Second, teleoperation systems are very sensitive to data loss and latency [6].
- An important question can be raised concerning the amount of latency compared to the amount of data loss that a system can tolerate.
- Summing up, the authors detail three main solution spaces to improve haptic communication: .
III. HAPTIC COMMUNICATION OVER THE INTERNET
- With the increase of mobile Internet-enabled machines and devices over the world, mobile networks play an important role as the medium for the transmission and reception of data.
- Nonetheless, according to [38] the effects of packet loss can be managed by using mechanism which increase the communication reliability, but, as a result these mechanisms will increase the total latency.
- Again, based on the client-server scheme, in [54] haptic communication is achieved by employing the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) on the application layer in order to establish a teleoperation session and to manage haptic transport streams that use Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP) which encapsulates the haptic data in UDP packets.
- Last but not least, there are two application layer protocols with a focus on security which is a major concern for e.g. telesurgery applications.
- Hence, flexible traffic management while simultaneously supporting strict and dynamic QoS requirements is yet critical and challenging in the Internet.
IV. HAPTIC DATA REDUCTION AND COMPRESSION
- Haptic sensor readings, especially when reading the kinesthetic signals, as previously mentioned in Section II-C, have a sampling rate of 1 kHz or even higher.
- In comparison to other sampling methods such as the level crossings method (that incorporates absolute differences instead of percentages between samples), the perceptual-based kinesthetic data reduction schemes are proven to have good but similar accuracy [90].
- Otherwise, the input sample is transmitted to the other side and the transmitted sample is used for updating the prediction model.
- The necessary step before compressing the vibrotactile signals is to model them.
- Therefore, for encoding the texture signals, the bitrate should be allocated more in the low-energy frequency bands compared than to the high-energy ones.
V. HAPTIC CONTROL SYSTEM APPROACHES
- As the network infrastructure and mechanisms keep improving there are physical barriers, as in the case of long distance communications, that can introduce a minimum latency which can make certain teleoperation applications impossible.
- A detailed description of the theoretical base of passivity-based control has been made in [131].
- As previously discussed, stability and transparency are conflicting objectives in passivity-based teleoperation design.
- The estimated model parameters on the master side are transmitted to the slave to guide the slaves motion.
- Another well known but closed loop control scheme, the Smith predictor, is using a plant model transfer function and a time delay model to compensate for the network delays in the communication.
VI. HAPTIC COMMUNICATION OVER 5G MOBILE NETWORKS
- Providing the services mentioned above in remote geographical areas and in an on-demand manner, where high bandwidth and dedicated networking infrastructure is not available, is yet another crucial aspect, which can be addressed by mobile networks.
- While earlier generations of mobile networks focused on mobile broadband services (targeting services for people), it has already been identified that 5G should, in addition, address the two new areas of massive machine-type communication (M-MTC) and critical machine-type communication (C-MTC), where services are provided to things and objects.
- The speed at which the user is requesting services from the network provider.
- The virtualization and softwarization of network functions drastically decreases the dependency on hardware and therefore increases the scalability and reliability of the network.
- Since teleoperation with force feedback can be classified as a latency-sensitive application, the aforementioned technologies will be used to provide low-latency connectivity to users of various types of applications with low latency requirements.
VII. LESSONS LEARNED AND FUTURE CHALLENGES
- Without a doubt, teleoperation is an ever-evolving field mainly combining robotics, telecommunications and data processing.
- This includes the optimization of the communication channel by investigating the mobile network infrastructure and the development of new protocols and evaluation metrics based on precise traffic models.
- Having a set of different control and communication approaches to implement teleoperation systems is important, because they vary in their robustness towards certain QoS parameters (e.g. delay, delay variation or packet loss).
- Furthermore, their performance also varies between tasks (e.g. free space versus contact, soft objects versus rigid surface, etc.).
- Figure 8 (a) illustrates a hypothetical performance measurement for three control schemes in different network conditions.
VIII. CONCLUSIONS
- Haptic communication for bilateral teleoperation systems is among technologies which are starting to be adopted by an increasing number of immersive Internet applications.
- It will gain great benefits from the development of communication infrastructures such as the fifth generation of mobile networks (5G).
- Following the requirements of haptic communication over the Internet, this survey paper documents the fundamentals of haptic communication over the Internet and the latest advances which will allow the user to experience high quality immersion.
- This paper also focuses on the three main research interests, namely data compression and reduction, robust stability control, and multi-modal data streaming over the Internet.
- The authors also described the requirements and environment dynamics for teleoperation systems.
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Citations
529 citations
Cites background from "Toward Haptic Communications Over t..."
...The technical requirements for haptic Internet capability cannot be fully provided by current systems, as discussed in [40]....
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Additional excerpts
...friction, and likewise [243]....
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Cites background from "Toward Haptic Communications Over t..."
...Some analyses have been made on a particular computational platform of edge computing in 5G, particularly mobile edge computing (MEC) [10], [11]....
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References
13 citations
"Toward Haptic Communications Over t..." refers methods in this paper
...A detailed description of QoS control methods has been given in [39], referring to traffic management, flow control, error control, ∆-causality control, other types of control and last but not least the aspect of synchronization of media streams....
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"Toward Haptic Communications Over t..." refers background or methods in this paper
...Finally, in [32], a module measures the complexity of a task to dynamically adjust the number of active paths and network resources for each media stream....
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...Nevertheless, the high requirements of these applications demand networks which allow ultra-reliable and low-latency communication (URLLC) for the challenging task of applying the required Quality of Service (QoS) for maintaining the user’s Quality of Experience (QoE) at optimum levels....
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...Number of approaches have been proposed to provide QoS including: relative priority marking, service marking, label switching, static per-hop classification, Integrated Services (IntServ) and Differentiated Services (DiffServ)....
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...20 3) System performance as a function of the offered Qualityof-Service Different control and communication approaches lead to different types of artifacts....
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...As with every networking system, the correct functionality of NBCS is liable to several obstacles which negatively affect their performance and can also be viewed as performance indicators which allow the comparison between different protocols and the quantification of the Quality of Service (QoS) they can deliver which is of critical importance to applications such as telesurgery....
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13 citations
"Toward Haptic Communications Over t..." refers methods in this paper
...[186] used an adaptive damper to dissipate the energy injected into the local model system during the model update....
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...To allow for a moderate model update which guarantees the stability, passivity-based schemes were developed [183], [185], [186]....
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"Toward Haptic Communications Over t..." refers methods in this paper
...A method that combines time domain passivity control with perceptual data reduction is introduced in [176]....
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...Compared to the existing WV-based haptic data reduction approaches, the TDPA-based haptic data reduction scheme presented in [176] can robustly deal with time-varying delays...
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...[176] have recently combined the PD approach with the TDPA control scheme to reduce the packet rate over the communication network while preserving system stability in the presence of time-varying and unknown delays....
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...[210] [176] [198], [200] [211] [176] [176] [198], [200]...
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Frequently Asked Questions (2)
Q2. What are the future works in "Towards haptic communications over the 5g tactile internet" ?
Therefore, it is essential to explore further how teleoperation systems can be optimally integrated into the next generation ( 5G ) mobile networks. One of the future challenges is to fill the gaps in Table III, by combining haptic data reduction with the existing control approaches for bilateral teleoperation. It is obvious that in the future generations of the Internet, operators will have a more active role in acquiring and processing user data, especially since prediction will play a major role in optimizing the QoS offered by the network [ 230 ]. Future work could focus on defining objective system performance metrics, which will allow us to analyze and to compare different control and communication approaches for bilateral teleoperation systems.