Resilient Remote Environment Emulation for Human-to-Machine Communications

Research Project, 2025

The emerging vision of the 6G network can best be summarised as one that intelligently unifies the human experience across physical, digital and biological worlds.  Tactile Internet (TI) is a highly anticipated use case of 6G which realises multi-sensory connectivity between humans and machines.  Human-to-Machine (H2M) communication is imperative to the vision of TI.  It allows humans to immersively interact with remotely-located machines/robots through “feeling” and “controlling” real and virtual machines/robots.  Immersive experience of humans through remote machines has significant economic and societal impact, cutting across many different sectors – from controlling tactile robots from afar in industrial settings through to assistive technologies for the blind and vision-impaired. Aside from clear societal benefits, emerging H2M applications and tactile technologies are projected to grow new markets and bring enormous benefit to the global economy. 
 
There are three critical domains of operation in H2M communication: (a) a human domain comprising a human operator controlling a master interface such as a tactile glove; (b) a machine domain comprising remotely controlled machines/robots with sensors and actuators; and (c) a network domain that supports bilateral multi-modal communication between the human and machine domains.  In order for humans to fully experience real-time immersion in remote environments, control and haptic feedback data exchange between the master and machine domains, is time-critical. For example, in an industrial application, the tolerable latency between sending a control signal from the master and receiving haptic feedback from the machine is 1 ms. This stringent latency requirement limits how far apart the master and machine domains can be deployed, clearly in conflict with the idea of providing remote immersive experiences. Further, mission-critical H2M applications necessitate a 99.999% availability, equating to a tolerance of in average only 0.86 second of connection and/or service downtime per day.