Human skills will be digitized and democratized through the Internet in the future: the future Internet will allow you to use robotics and tactile feedback to transmit expertise in real time, no matter where you are or where the problem you want to solve. Consider a highly specialized surgeon performing remote surgery on patients thousands of kilometers away. Although the robot is using the scalpel, the operation seems as real to the surgeon as if she used the scalpel with her own hand.
However, this assumption is not feasible today. This is due to the use of force, vibration or user's movement to reproduce the feeling of touch, so as to "deceive" the skin and body into thinking that our feeling in the virtual world is real, which requires a network with sub millisecond delay. A network with ultra-low delay and ultra-high bandwidth, in which operation instructions and tactile feedback occur end-to-end with a maximum delay of one thousandth of a second. This extremely low delay limits the maximum communication distance, which is only 150 kilometers even under ideal conditions. Optical data transmission is not appropriate when information must move back and forth between a human operator and a remote slave robot within a delay range.
The Department of electronic and computer engineering at Aarhus University is leading a new research and development project called etouch, which aims to overcome the physical limitations of today's telecommunications. Its purpose is to create an immediate response, regardless of distance, so that users can perceive tactile feedback without significant delay, even if the communication distance is thousands of kilometers away. To solve this problem, the team will use models to mediate remote operations. One of the virtual models (Digital twins) will accurately describe the remote environment and generate tactile feedback locally and immediately, rather than transmitting it over long distances.
However, in the current data processing mode, it is quite challenging to create an accurate model and update the model effectively and reliably in real time. Therefore, the team will use edge computing. The team will not focus on remote surgery, but on industrial applications with relatively simple operation. If this method is feasible, it may have a breakthrough impact on the future Internet and make the tactile Internet spread in intercontinental distance and even space.