The Haptic Tele-Operation System for Tactile Internet: Architecture, Challenges, and Implementation

With the emergence and development of the Tactile Internet (TI), tele-operation combined with haptic feedback has experienced a paradigm upgrade in recent years. Theories and techniques to enhance the haptic presence in tele-operation have been extensively investigated for TI benefits. However, there has been little research on the practical deployment and implementation of TI in tele-operation, and the application potential of TI remains to be exploited. Therefore, to leverage the advantages of TI, we investigate the haptic tele-operation (HapTop) system and implement the HapTop platform for TI. Specifically, we first outline the architecture and application scenarios of the HapTop system. Subsequently, we present the main challenges and solutions in the HapTop system concerning the characterization, acquisition, transmission, and representation of haptic signals. Finally, we describe in detail the practical implementation and performance evaluation of the HapTop platform. The evaluation results demonstrate that the HapTop platform can provide a highly perceptual haptic presence for the users in the tele-operation task. The proposed HapTop platform greatly facilitates researchers in developing TI algorithms and performing practical experiments within a unified platform.