Faster The Speed of Light

With a grant from Independent Research Fund Denmark, a team of researchers and experts from industry and Aarhus University will try to solve the fundamental problem that the speed of light simply is not fast enough for the Internet of Skills.

Human skills will be digitalized and democratized in the future through the Internet of Skills: a future internet that will allow you to utilize robot technology and haptic feedback to transmit expertise in real-time, regardless of where you are or where the problem to be solved is.

Consider a highly specialized surgeon performing a tele-surgery on a patient thousands of kilometers away in which, despite the fact that a robot is using the scalpel, the operation seems as real to the surgeon as if she were using the scalpel with her own hands.

Physically impossible
This vision, however, is not feasible today. This is due to the fact that reproducing the sensation of touch utilizing forces, vibrations, or movements on the user, and thus ‘fooling’ the skin and body into thinking that what we are feeling in the virtual world is genuine, demands a network with sub-millisecond latency. 

Networks with ultra-low latency and ultra-high bandwidth, in which operation command and haptic feedback occur end-to-end with a maximum delay of one-thousandth of a second.

Such extremely low latency limits the maximum communication distance to only 150 km, even under ideal conditions. Light cannot travel any further when information has to move backwards and forwards between the human operator and remote slave robot within the latency bound.

“Enabling real-time transmission of haptic sensation over the Internet will potentially allow diverse physical operations without humans being physically present. This will pave the way towards the envisioned Internet of Skills which will better disperse and democratize skills and expertise among people, regardless of gender, age, and other diversities. 

This can reduce the amount of travel and associated CO2 emission. However, the required level of immersion is unattainable over long distances at this stage. Hence, novel solutions are needed to address the challenges,” says Associate Professor Qi Zhang from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Aarhus University.  READ MORE...