The robot, my bartender

Patrons are waiting at the bar at the city’s hippest club, but the bartender can’t keep up with all the drinks orders. In future, he will be able to have assistance with these so-called ‘pick processes’: From a cobot, a collaborative robot, such as the one already in operation at the TU Dresden’s Centre for Tactile Internet with Human-in-the-Loop (CeTI). It works together with humans – in direct proximity, and without any protective devices, because its sensors can detect obstacles and then automatically switch it off. The robot looks like a shiny grey sausage with orange joints. Controlled by a glove, it systematically grabs a bottle and pours the liquid carefully into a glass.

Cobots can particularly act as assistants in automated manufacturing. This also requires 5G, with the ‘tactile Internet’ designed to be able to network hundreds of users and devices in real time. To achieve this, latencies need to be under one millisecond. Robotics – and the notion of multidisciplinarity – plays a key role in many tactile-Internet projects. In Dresden, it’s not just IT specialists working on the next stage of the Internet, but rather also communication engineers, mechanical engineers, psychologists and philosophers.