A seriously, disruptive low-latency, high-speed, high-density wireless technology known as ATTO is being developed by researchers at iMinds, the digital research center of Flanders, Belgium, and Ghent University.
The key objective is to provide dedicated 100Gbps connections to dense groups of mobile entities such as robots, thereby giving them instantaneous access to remote computing resources. Numerous mobile applications are foreseen, one being the creation of intelligent swarms of robots, says Bob Emmerson, freelance writer and IoT Industry Observer.
In the photo alongside ATTO antennas have been built into floor tiles. That allows the distance between the fiber-fed antennas and the receiving object, a prototype mobile robot in this case, to be limited to a maximum of 10 centimeters. This is needed in order to deliver up- and downstream bitrates of 100Gbps, which is realised with extremely low mobile signal delays (less than 10 µs). Low latency is needed to accommodate real-time interactions based on distributed, high-performance computing.
Professor Piet Demeester (iMinds – Ghent University) has been awarded a European ERC Advanced Grant to pursue the development of this groundbreaking technology. Over the next five years he will receive 2.5 million euro to develop a fully functional ATTO proof-of-concept system.
Integrating intelligent robotics into our lives
Mobile communication technologies have had a huge impact on society. What started off with the introduction of mobile telephony has led to the creation of technology that allows us to connect people and things to the Internet.
Professor Demeester thinks that we should prepare for the next step: integrating intelligent robotics into our daily lives. “In a number of domains – such as manufacturing – robots have become indispensable, but they still suffer from several shortcomings. Moving forward, flexible swarms of intelligent robots need to be created that interact in perfect harmony with human workers. And the same can be done in numerous other sectors, such as healthcare, transportation, professional and domestic services, etc. We think ATTO cells could unlock that potential.”
The research team expects that ATTO will support the deployment of demanding wireless services in application domains such as reconfigurable robot factories, intelligent hospitals, flexible offices, smart schools, etc.
In the longer term, the technology could be instrumental in the creation of large mobile robot swarms, enabling individual robots to tap in to the computing power of the other robots in the swarm and/or local computing power in their immediate environment. The researchers even see ATTO as a potential enabler to develop advanced brain-computer interfaces that augment (or repair) human cognitive or sensory-motor functions.
The author of this blog is Bob Emmerson, freelance writer and IoT Industry Observer
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