Metarobotics for Industry and Society: Vision, Technologies, and Opportunities

Metarobotics aims to combine next generation wireless communication, multisense immersion, and collective intelligence to provide a pervasive, itinerant, and noninvasive access and interaction with distant robotized applications. Industry and society are expected to benefit from these functionalities. For instance, robot programmers will no longer travel worldwide to plan and test robot motions, even collaboratively. Instead, they will have a personalized access to robots and their environments from anywhere, thus spending more time with family and friends. Students enrolled in robotics courses will be taught under authentic industrial conditions in real-time. This article describes objectives of metarobotics in society, industry, and in-between. It identifies and surveys technologies likely to enable their completion and provides an architecture to put forward the interplay of key components of metarobotics. Potentials for self-determination, self-efficacy, and work-life-flexibility in robotics-related applications in Society 5.0, Industry 4.0, and Industry 5.0 are outlined.