Human-Agent-Robot Task Coordination in FiWi-Based Tactile Internet Infrastructures Using Context- and Self-Awareness

With the advent of safe collaborative robots, their seamless integration into human teams as teammates is starting to gain steam as part of the vision of the emerging Tactile Internet. The Tactile Internet lies at the nexus of computerization, automation, and robotization. While necessary, low task execution time and ultra-reliable human-robot connectivity are not sufficient to unleash the full potential of the resultant human-agent-robot teamwork (HART) applications. In this paper, we propose a context- and self-aware HART-centric allocation scheme for both physical and digital tasks to coordinate the automation and augmentation of mutually beneficial human–machine coactivities while spreading ownership of robots across users over integrated fiber-wireless (FiWi) Tactile Internet infrastructures. In addition to realizing collective context-awareness via HART-centric task coordination, we aim at exploiting local self-awareness in order to improve the energy-delay performance of robots. Further, we present an analytical framework to estimate the packet transmission delay and human–robot connection reliability. Our results indicate that our proposed context- and self-aware HART-centric task coordination scheme obtains a low task execution time while minimizing the energy consumption and operational expenditures (OPEX) of mobile robots.