HARU: Haptic Augmented Reality-Assisted User-Centric Industrial Network Planning
12 July 2022
To support Industry 4.0 applications with haptics and human-machine interaction, 6G requires a new framework that is fully autonomous, visual, and interactive. In this paper, we provide an end-to-end solution, HARU, for private network planning services, especially the industrial networks. The solution consists of following functions: collecting visual and sensory data from the user device, reconstructing 3D radio propagation environment and network planning on server, visualizing the network performance with AR on the display of the user devices and enabling user interaction with haptic feedback. The functions are empowered by three key technical components: 1) vision- and sensor fusion-based 3D environment reconstruction, 2) ray tracing-based radio map generation and network planning, and 3) AR-assisted network visualization enabled by real-time camera relocalization. We conducted the proof-of-concept in a Bosch plant in Germany and showed good network coverage of the optimized antenna location, as well as high accuracy in both environment reconstruction and camera relocalization. We also achieved real-time AR-supported network monitoring with an end-to-end latency of about 32 ms per frame.
