HARU: Haptic Augmented Reality-Assisted User-Centric Industrial Network Planning

TL;DR

HARU is an integrated AR and haptic system that enhances industrial network planning by reconstructing environments, optimizing network configurations, and providing real-time visualization and feedback, supporting Industry 4.0 needs.

Contribution

The paper introduces HARU, a novel end-to-end framework combining 3D environment reconstruction, radio planning, and AR visualization with haptic feedback for industrial networks.

Findings

Successful environment reconstruction with high accuracy.

Optimized antenna placement ensuring good network coverage.

Real-time AR visualization with 32 ms latency.

Abstract

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 industrial networks. The solution consists of the following functions: collecting visual and sensory data from the user device, reconstructing 3D radio propagation environment and conducting network planning on a server, and visualizing network performance with AR on the user device with enabled 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.