Teleoperation over 5G Networks: Enabling Haptic Interaction in Mobile Audio-Visual Communications

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Audiovisual communications is at the core of multimedia systems that allow users to interact across distances. While audiovisual information provides a user with a satisfactory impression of being present in a remote environment, physical interaction and manipulation are not supported. True immersion into a distant environment requires the ability to physically interact with remote objects and to literally get in touch with other people. Touching and manipulating objects remotely becomes possible if we augment traditional audiovisual communications by the haptic modality. Haptic communications is a relatively young field of research that has the potential to revolutionize human-human and human-machine interaction.Recently, 5G mobile networks have gained considerable research attention, including the idea of a control-oriented communication solution (also called the Tactile Internet). The targeted low latency communication, the high level of coverage and reliability and the improved throughput make 5G networks very suitable for teleoperation applications with haptic feedback. In this project, we investigate teleoperation with haptic feedback over 5G networks in two directions (1) Top-down: focusing on application (APP) layer mechanisms while considering network characteristics; (2) Bottom-up: focusing on medium access (MAC) layer resource allocation while considering the application characteristics. The main objective of this project is to develop suitable haptic communication and resource allocation/mobility solutions and to perform joint optimization of haptic communication and 5G radio resource allocation with the goal of maximizing the teleoperation performance over 5G networks. The two PIs collaborate on this research topic since January 2016.