With the advent of the 5G era, is the spring of robots far away?
Image source: Negro Elkha - stock.adobe.com
If the pairing of robotics and cellular communications seems like an odd one, that’s because of the fifth generation of wireless technology, or 5G.
5G is the first technology to address the needs of such applications wirelessly, rather than simply increasing data rates and expanding coverage like previous generations. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), which regulates these technologies worldwide, calls the ambitious standard IMT-2020, and it will achieve its goals by completely changing how cellular networks are built, what devices they can connect, the frequencies they operate on, and the applications they serve.
Fifth-generation wireless technology will pave the way for a new generation of robots, some of which can roam freely controlled via wireless rather than wired communication links, while also taking advantage of vast cloud computing power and data storage resources.
With these capabilities, robots can be precisely and dynamically controlled in near real time and connected to people and machines locally and globally.
In short,
5G technology will fully support applications such as the "factory of the future"
and many applications that were previously not capable of cellular and robotics technology.
Do we still need humans?
There are many debates these days around robots and how they, along with artificial intelligence (AI), will take over the world, including some that see a grim outlook for humanity’s fate. Robot advocates argue that robots will only complement humans, performing certain functions that humans are not good at, rather than replacing them. On the other hand, some believe that robots could eliminate millions of jobs by replacing humans in manufacturing and other industries. Whether robots will eventually take over from humans remains to be seen, but 5G technology will almost certainly allow robots to operate more efficiently than ever before and serve more applications.
Robots are already ubiquitous in manufacturing, with the automotive industry perhaps the most obvious example. Other key application examples include industrial and medical. Innovations in 5G will further expand the capabilities of robots, to the point where it will be necessary to expand the definition of robots. So self-driving cars are robots that follow instructions from a variety of sensors to make decisions and perform a variety of functions, likely much more accurately, reliably, and quickly than humans. Gyrocopters and other drones also fall into this category.
The best example of how 5G and robots can work together is in the healthcare sector, where robots have great potential.
With 5G communications and cloud technology, robots can not only perform daily tasks, such as:
Moving items from one place to another within a hospital also enables remote surgery, orchestrated remotely by a doctor and performed locally by a robot. This type of surgery was first demonstrated in 2001 at an event called "Operation Lindbergh," when an endocrine surgeon named Jacques Marescaux (1948–) performed a gallbladder removal operation on a patient in Strasbourg, France (about 6,200 kilometers away) while sitting at a console in New York City, USA.
figure 1:
Fast forward to around 2025, and imagine a time when robots and humans in a hospital operating room use 5G technology to connect to surgeons anywhere on the planet through the cloud, orchestrating the surgical procedure. At the same time, specialists in one or more locations can provide their expertise in real time to assist the surgeon. While this already seems amazing, it’s just the beginning: using virtual reality (VR) and the ubiquitous cloud, it will also be possible to convert imaging scans into virtual three-dimensional (3D) representations of patients.
Then, using this "digital clone", the surgeon remotely orchestrates the patient's virtual surgery while one or more robots perform the actual surgery. The doctor will have a virtual yet tangible "experience" because bones, tissues, and organs will have a different "touch and feel". Although remote surgery may not be fully realized within a decade, it will continue to move forward step by step as 5G and robotics technologies mature.
Why is this not possible now?
Aside from the fact that the robots and the entire “ecosystem” needed to enable telesurgery and other next-generation robotic applications are still in their infancy, current 4G networks simply don’t have the characteristics to make them possible. Namely, since they require virtually instantaneous response times, the metric of “latency” must be reduced to unprecedented levels. Latency is basically the time span between when input is sent from one point in a communications link and when it is returned without error from another point. For the robots of the future, low latency is essential for high-reliability, machine-centric communications.
figure 2:
Current 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) cellular networks have a round-trip latency of about 50ms, but to make applications such as robotics possible, the 5G standard recognizes that latency of less than 1ms will be required , which is a huge technical challenge. Compared to reducing latency to such low levels, the other benefits promised by 5G, such as cloud computing and increased data rates, are relatively "simple" because it deals with the immutable laws of physics.
To understand this, consider that the speed of electromagnetic radiation in a vacuum is 3 x 10 8 m/s. This maximum speed is slightly reduced due to the presence of the Earth's atmosphere, which is not a vacuum. However, when you factor in a number of other factors, including the optical fiber, terrestrial and satellite communication links, and electronics and connectors that the signal must pass through, the propagation speed is greatly reduced. As a result, the shorter the physical distance between point A and point B, the lower the latency. This is how 5G intends to reduce this metric to < 1ms.
5G will require a massive increase in the geographic density of data centers that collectively form the cloud, since a data center in one location may be too far away from most other locations to reduce latency to acceptable levels. This increase, combined with data rates greater than 1 Gb/s and the use of new cellular frequencies (an order of magnitude higher than currently used), will be essential to achieving latency < 1 ms over ranges of 1–100 km.
Factory of the Future
5G will play a vital role in creating the factory of the future.
The factory of the future is another application that requires latency of less than 1ms. Combined with the nearly unlimited data processing and storage capabilities in the cloud, 5G communications will enable robots in next-generation manufacturing environments to do much more than they can today. Robots will be able to exchange large amounts of information between themselves and factory employees, revolutionizing the "shop floor" and other 5G-enabled devices such as wearables and technologies such as augmented reality (AR).
image 3:
As robots become mobile and able to interact with people, productivity, product quality, and operator safety will be significantly improved. In order to maintain extremely low latency throughout the future factory, a high degree of reliance on edge computing in the network is necessary. Edge computing brings intelligence and functionality to the "edge" of the network where the actual application is located, similar to the distributed computing that was achieved decades ago.
Field Robot
5G and GPS-based positioning and navigation will unlock the potential of robots, allowing them to perform functions that are currently impossible. For example, in the agricultural field, robots can roam in the fields, monitor crop growth, and send video and other sensor information back to computers almost anywhere, and even perform activities such as pesticide spraying, pruning and harvesting. A company called FFRobotics has developed a fresh fruit robotic harvester that combines robotic control with image processing software algorithms, allowing the robot to find and distinguish between saleable and damaged products and fruits that are neither unripe nor rotten.
A technology called high-throughput plant phenotyping (HTPP) combines genetics, sensors, and robotics to develop new crop varieties, as well as those with improved nutritional content and tolerance to environmental conditions. The technology uses sensors on a robot to measure a variety of traits and sends the results to scientists who may be located anywhere for analysis. Other robots are being developed to plant and track seeds to make farming more efficient, as well as many other aspects of agriculture. In the future, many agricultural tasks may be performed by remotely controlled machines.
Figure 4:
Keep in mind that 5G will not revolutionize robotics overnight, as many of the applications and technologies that enable robotics are currently nascent, in development, or just on the drawing board. We should view 5G as the beginning of a new era in telecommunications, fully supporting robotics and many other applications for the first time. Furthermore, mobile robots are still a long way from mature technology, and it may take years before they can be deployed on a large scale for applications ranging from manufacturing and production to agriculture, search and rescue missions, large-scale search and rescue missions, and many other applications.
5G will require disruptive innovation in all aspects of the network, from the development of millimeter wave communication systems to software-defined virtual network architectures and new wireless access methods, so that many robots can work without interfering with each other in a small area. Latency is the most important, and researchers must find ways to reduce it to almost nothing.
Barry Manz is President of Manz Communications, Inc., the technical media relations agency he founded in 1987. He has worked with more than 100 companies in the RF, microwave, defense, test and measurement, semiconductor, embedded systems, lightwave, and other markets. Barry has written articles for several offline and online trade publications and has authored a variety of white papers, application notes, seminar papers, technical reference guides, and web content. He is a contributing editor to the Journal of Electronic Defense, editor of Military Microwave Digest, co-founder of MilCOTS Digest, and editor-in-chief of Microwaves & RF.
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