Transcriber: Taeyoung Jang Reviewer: David DeRuwe
Hello, I’m Zhao Wei, a researcher from the University of Sydney,
and I've been living in Sydney for more than six years.
In October last year, my wife and I were excited
to become parents for the first time to a little boy.
Oh see, this is my cute little baby.
But my parents live a long way away in a small town in China.
Due to COVID-19, worldwide travel bans, and close the borders,
my parents haven’t met their only child in person.
This has been difficult for all of us.
Although our family communicates over video calls
and we send them lots of photos,
what they want more than anything is to cuddle him,
to hold their only grandchild, to pinch his chubby arms,
and allow him to sleep.
To touch him.
Today, I’m developing a low-delay communication method,
which I hope will one day help families like mine
to be able to touch over the internet.
For a person to touch something or someone remotely using the tactile internet,
a user would wear a highly sensitive glove,
stylus, or other type of device,
which can render the sense of touch and transfer that sensation to the user.
At the other end,
an actuator device such as a robotic avatar
would mimic the movement of a human operator
and collect the touch feedback using tactile sensors.
For example, if my parents want to touch my son,
they could put on some highly-sensitive gloves
that allows us to control a robotic hand next to my son
to reach through the internet and hold my baby’s hand.
Touch isn’t the only way.
For this to work, the robotic hand should be able
to feed back information to the human operator
and weight, texture, softness, warmth, or the chubbiness of my son’s cheek.
Here you can see how you can not only use
the tactile internet to control a robotic arm,
but you will be able to feel the weight and the texture
of the objects in the virtual environment.
This is important when precise, delicate handling is required,
like in the manufacture of dangerous goods or chemicals.
It will allow a human operator to work at a safe distance,
while doing work that requires expert skills and the human touch,
using a robotic glove and the robotic hand
to control and feel a sense of touch.
My research is not about robotics;
it’s about communication, to allow us to touch
despite the long distance that separates us.
The current internet mainly supports transmission of visual and audio media,
but for tactile internet to work,
we first need to reduce delays and increase reliability,
so that there is no perceptible lag.
When your finger touches something, you'll feel it immediately.
It transmits to the brain.
Tactile internet needs to work the same way.
Although 5G technology provides ultra-reliable,
low-latency communication for radio access networks,
for long distance commmunication of tactile internet,
the major bottleneck is the speed of light,
which is known as upper limit for the speed.
So to explain, light or radio frequency signals
can travel 200 kilometers per millisecond in fiber
or 300 kilometers in the air.
China, for example, is about 7,000 kilometers away from Australia.
The propagation delay alone
will be 35 milliseconds in the fiber and 23 milliseconds in the air,
which is much larger than the one millisecond required
for the tactile internet to to work.
One way to reduce that delay is to predict the future state of the user
to predict what the movement my hand will make
in tenths or hundredths of milliseconds, by using artificial intelligence.
That way, we can send the predicted movement to the receiver in advance.
Over the last few decades, the internet has dramatically changed the way we live.
I believe that tactile internet will redefine
the way we interact with each other and with the world in the future.
Just raise your hand.
I want you to imagine what you could do if we could touch over the internet.
You could feel a fabric when online shopping.
A piano teacher from another country could teach you in the whole new way.
A doctor could diagnose a medical condition for a remote patient
and technical experts could even conduct repairs
on space infrastructure from down here on Earth.
With tactile internet, the skills of experts can be delivered remotely.
So let’s take a glimpse of the more distant future of tactile internet.
Here is our very early version of a prototype we are developing:
The user can control the robotic hand to make a fist or open palm,
using just the human brain’s electrical signal
with the help of a brain machine interface.
In the future, the user could even feel
the sense of touch transmitted back to them
by stimulating some specific areas of brain.
I call it “the cerebral internet.”
At the current stage, invasive brain-machine interface
are still needed for a highly reliable system,
but in the future, this will no longer be necessary.
A viable tactile internet or even silver internet
would allow families to hug, colleagues to shake hands,
while geographically separated
and expert skills being delivered freely all over the world.
While we hope my parents
will be able to meet their grandson in person one day,
soon, the tactile internet will literally be able to keep us all in touch.
(Applause)