Task-oriented joint design of communication and computing for Internet of Skills

Nowadays, the internet is taking a revolutionary step forward, which is known as Internet of Skills. The Internet of Skills is a concept that refers to a network of sensors, actuators, and machines that enable knowledge, skills, and expertise delivery between people and machines, regardless of their geographical locations. This concept allows an immersive remote operation and access to expertise through virtual and augmented reality, haptic communications, robotics, and other cutting-edge technologies with various applications, including remote surgery and diagnosis in healthcare, remote laboratory and training in education, remote driving in transportation, and advanced manufacturing in Industry 4.0. In this thesis, we investigate three fundamental communication requirements of Internet of Skills applications, namely ultra-low latency, ultra-high reliability, and wireless resource utilization efficiency. Although 5G communications provide cutting-edge solutions for achieving ultra-low latency and ultra-high reliability with good resource utilization efficiency, meeting these requirements is difficult, particularly in long-distance communications where the distance between source and destination is more than 300 km, considering delays and reliability issues in networking components as well as physical limits of the speed of light. Furthermore, resource utilization efficiency must be improved further to accommodate the rapidly increasing number of mobile devices. Therefore, new design techniques that take into account both communication and computing systems with the task-oriented approach are urgently needed to satisfy conflicting latency and reliability requirements while improving resource utilization efficiency. First, we design and implement a 5G-based teleoperation prototype for Internet of Skills applications. We presented two emerging Internet of Skills use cases in healthcare and education. We conducted extensive experiments evaluating local and long-distance communication latency and reliability to gain insights into the current capabilities and limitations. From our local experiments in laboratory environment where both operator and robot in the same room, we observed that communication latency is around 15 ms with a 99.9% packet reception rate (communication reliability). However, communication latency increases up to 2 seconds in long-distance scenarios (between the UK and China), while it is around 50-300 ms within the UK experiments. In addition, our observations revealed that communication reliability and overall system performance do not exhibit a direct correlation. Instead, the number of consecutive packet drops emerged as the decisive factor influencing the overall system performance and user quality of experience. In light of these findings, we proposed a two-way timeout approach. We discarded stale packets to mitigate waiting times effectively and, in turn, reduce the latency. Nevertheless, we observed that the proposed approach reduced latency at the expense of reliability, thus verifying the challenge of the conflicting latency and reliability requirements. Next, we propose a task-oriented prediction and communication co-design framework to meet conflicting latency and reliability requirements. The proposed framework demonstrates the task-oriented joint design of communication and computing systems, where we considered packet losses in communications and prediction errors in prediction algorithms to derive the upper bound for overall system reliability. We revealed the tradeoff between overall system reliability and resource utilization efficiency, where we consider 5G NR as an example communication system. The proposed framework is evaluated with real-data samples and generated synthetic data samples. From the results, the proposed framework achieves better latency and reliability tradeoff with a 77.80% resource utilization efficiency improvement compared to a task-agnostic benchmark. In addition, we demonstrate that deploying a predictor at the receiver side achieves better overall reliability compared to a system that predictor at the transmitter. Finally, we propose an intelligent mode-switching framework to address the resource utilization challenge. We jointly design the communication, user intention recognition, and modeswitching systems to reduce communication load subject to joint task completion probability. We reveal the tradeoff between task prediction accuracy and task observation length, showing that higher prediction accuracy can be achieved when the task observation length increases. The proposed framework achieves more than 90% task prediction accuracy with 60% observation length. We train a DRL agent with real-world data from our teleoperation prototype for modeswitching between teleoperation and autonomous modes. Our results show that the proposed framework achieves up to 50% communication load reduction with similar task completion probability compared to conventional teleoperation

Task-oriented prediction and communication co-design for haptic communications

Prediction has recently been considered as a promising approach to meet low-latency and high-reliability requirements in long-distance haptic communications. However, most of the existing methods did not take features of tasks and the relationship between prediction and communication into account. In this paper, we propose a task-oriented prediction and communication co-design framework, where the reliability of the system depends on prediction errors and packet losses in communications. The goal is to minimize the required radio resources subject to the low-latency and high-reliability requirements of various tasks. Specifically, we consider the just noticeable difference (JND) as a performance metric for the haptic communication system. We collect experiment data from a real-world teleoperation testbed and use time-series generative adversarial networks (TimeGAN) to generate a large amount of synthetic data. This allows us to obtain the relationship between the JND threshold, prediction horizon, and the overall reliability including communication reliability and prediction reliability. We take 5G New Radio as an example to demonstrate the proposed framework and optimize bandwidth allocation and data rates of devices. Our numerical and experimental results show that the proposed framework can reduce wireless resource consumption up to 77.80% compared with a task-agnostic benchmark

5G-enabled education 4.0: enabling technologies, challenges, and solutions

New technologies such as mobile phones, social media and artificial intelligence, have significant impacts on every aspect of education, where digital connectivity is the foundation to support the way people learn. Current Internet and pre-5G cellular communication networks can deliver visual and auditory data, which enable distance/virtual learning. However, remote physical interaction between students and learning facilities, which is an essential part of a new education paradigm i.e., Education 4.0, is still missing. The 5G cellular network with excellent latency and reliability performance would be a game changer by enabling students to feel the physical objects and control them remotely. In this paper, we identify and discuss the unique opportunities the 5G networks can bring to Education 4.0, their technical challenges and potential solutions. We also showcase our Education 4.0 prototype of remote lab

Lessons learned: Symbiotic autonomous robot ecosystem for nuclear environments

Nuclear facilities have a regulatory requirement to measure radiation levels within Post Operational Cleanout (POCO) around nuclear facilities each year, resulting in a trend towards robotic deployments to gain an improved understanding during nuclear decommissioning phases. The UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority supports the view that human-in-the-loop robotic deployments are a solution to improve procedures and reduce risks within radiation haracterisation of nuclear sites. We present a novel implementation of a Cyber-Physical System (CPS) deployed in an analogue nuclear environment, comprised of a multi-robot team coordinated by a human-in-the-loop operator through a digital twin interface. The development of the CPS created efficient partnerships across systems including robots, digital systems and human. This was presented as a multi-staged mission within an inspection scenario for the heterogeneous Symbiotic Multi-Robot Fleet (SMuRF). Symbiotic interactions were achieved across the SMuRF where robots utilised automated collaborative governance to work together where a single robot would face challenges in full characterisation of radiation. Key contributions include the demonstration of symbiotic autonomy and query-based learning of an autonomous mission supporting scalable autonomy and autonomy as a service. The coordination of the CPS was a success and displayed further challenges and improvements related to future multi-robot fleets

Task-Oriented Prediction and Communication Co-Design for Haptic Communications

The real-world trajectory data samples are collected from our teleoperation testbed at University of Glasgow. The robotic arm is controlled by a human user to finish three types of tasks, namely, 1) Pushing a box: Push a small box from the starting point to the end point along a given routine, 2) Grouping items with different colors: Move items with the same color to the same area, 3) Writing symbols: Write symbols by controlling the robotic arm. For each task, there are multiple experiments, and each experiment dataset is provided in .csv format

Comparative Study on Energy Efficiency of WSNs and WMSNs for Surveillance Applications

The infrastructure required to deliver various "Internet of Things" (IoT) services is expected to be widely available in the very near future for application areas such as Smart Cities, Smart Homes, Intelligent Transportation and Smart Monitoring in the coming decades. In fact, it is expected that the number of devices connected to the Internet will exceed 50 billion by 2020. It is possible to use these infrastructures for environmental monitoring systems, especially for the early detection and prevention of disasters such as forest fires. Wireless sensors are an essential part of the IoT infrastructure and environmental monitoring/surveillance systems. Wireless sensor networks based on scalar sensors and wireless multimedia sensor networks are widely used for environmental monitoring. Multimedia surveillance systems have better accuracy but a shorter lifetime with multimedia surveillance systems. Therefore, it is necessary to study in detail their energy efficiency to better understand the introduction of more efficient algorithms and architectures. In this study, the lifetimes of the Wireless Sensor Networks(WSNs) and Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks(WMSNs) are considered in a comparative way. The results are presented for a forest fire detection case study using simulations as well as an example of a test bench to confirm the accuracy of the simulation tool used

Green building envelope designs in different climate and seismic zones: Multi-objective ANN-based genetic algorithm

In recent years, the major component of green building designs adopted by governments in order to reduce CO2 emissions as well as energy consumption is the green building envelope. The green envelope has the most important share in terms of thermal energy consumption, environment, and indoor comfort criteria. Determining the most suitable building envelope combination in the building life cycle is an important problem for designers. This study presents a new multi-objective approach that determines the most suitable green envelope designs for the buildings in different climate and earthquake zones, taking into account CO2 emissions, heating/cooling energy consumption, and material cost in terms of life cycle cost analysis. To this end, EnergyPlus building performance simulation program, artificial neural network (ANN), and genetic algorithm are used together. After the heating and cooling energy consumption, CO2 emissions, and material cost values are obtained for a certain number of the envelope alternatives with the EnergyPlus, ANN models that learn the working mechanism of EnergyPlus are trained according to these values. An ANN-based genetic algorithm procedure is developed to search the whole envelope alternative space by using the trained ANN models with EnergyPlus. The proposed approach allows searching in a very short time the whole alternative space, which is almost impossible to scan with EnergyPlus by reducing the time spent and the number of alternatives required for the design and simulation processes of the green building envelope. The proposed approach is performed for a design-stage city hospital structure in Turkey. Window type, the internal/external plaster, wall, and insulation materials along with the thicknesses of these materials, which consist of 46 different variables, are determined as envelope attributes for four different climate and seismic zones. The green building envelope designs obtained with the proposed approach are entered into EnergyPlus and the consistency of the results is compared. ANN models with an average accuracy of over 97% are developed. Without the CO2 emission cost in the life cycle cost, the mean absolute percent error (MAPE) values for each region are 0.67%, 0.6%, 0.58%, and 1.78%, respectively. With the CO2 emission cost in life cycle cost, the MAPE values for each region are 0.96%, 0.88%, 0.86%, and 0.43%, respectively. According to the obtained results, there is a consistency of over 99% between EnergyPlus and the proposed approach

An effective forest fire detection framework using heterogeneous wireless multimedia sensor networks

With improvements in the area of Internet of Things (IoT), surveillance systems have recently become more accessible. At the same time, optimizing the energy requirements of smart sensors, especially for data transmission, has always been very important and the energy efficiency of IoT systems has been the subject of numerous studies. For environmental monitoring scenarios, it is possible to extract more accurate information using smart multimedia sensors. However, multimedia data transmission is an expensive operation. In this study, a novel hierarchical approach is presented for the detection of forest fires. The proposed framework introduces a new approach in which multimedia and scalar sensors are used hierarchically to minimize the transmission of visual data. A lightweight deep learning model is also developed for devices at the edge of the network to improve detection accuracy and reduce the traffic between the edge devices and the sink. The framework is evaluated using a real testbed, network simulations, and 10-fold cross-validation in terms of energy efficiency and detection accuracy. Based on the results of our experiments, the validation accuracy of the proposed system is 98.28%, and the energy saving is 29.94%. The proposed deep learning model’s validation accuracy is very close to the accuracy of the best performing architectures when the existing studies and lightweight architectures are considered. In terms of suitability for edge computing, the proposed approach is superior to the existing ones with reduced computational requirements and model size