Tactile Internet opens many new possibilities as it solves one of the critical problems in the modern-day Internet, namely latency. Remote operations are possible that are deemed too dangerous with current technologies. Interacting directly with the remote environment without being physically present will be a life-changing experience. Before building the Tactile Internet infrastructure, continued research is necessary for haptic technology and networking. A modern Tactile Internet testbed is needed for researchers to conduct studies. The testbed uses Unity with Bullet Physics as an external physics engine and includes network possibilities and basic 3D tracking. Latency analysis shows a relation between the physics engine execution time and the scene's complexity. The testbed can handle many objects in the environment if continuous interactions among objects are limited. Force feedback analysis shows the expected behavior for the virtual spring implementation.

In this Thesis a fast, low-cost, anthropomorphic robotic hand with tactile feedback is designed. The hand consists of an index finger and a thumb, both of which have four degrees of freedom. All eight degrees of freedom are fully actuated using eight servomotors whose forces are transferred using tendons. The design introduces tendon routing to minimize the change in tendon tension as the joints rotate. To accomplish this at the 2 degree of freedom joints of thumb and index finger, a novel design for the ball and socket joint is created. The hand can be controlled using a tactile glove called the SenseGlove which also enables the user to receive force feedback. Testing reveals that the robot can open and close its fingers within 275 ms, and is able to grab a variety of objects.

Humans interact more and more at a distance these days. Where currently, this interaction is mainly visual and auditory, Tactile Internet (TI) also allows for remote kinesthetic interactions. With the devel- opment of TI, a paradigm shift is on the horizon where the current internet evolves from content delivery to a skill-set delivery network. Imagine the possibilities when specialists in whatever field can, in real- time, apply their skills everywhere in the world from within their living room. To make this a reality, TI applications have to be able to provide feedback to the user with ULL. The speed of light, however, constrains the extent to which TI can be used at large distances. This thesis hence takes a closer look at the problems that arise when long-distance TI is to be used and tries to tackle them. These problems are tackled by building a system based on Model-Mediated Teleoperation (MMT), where lo- cal simulations of the environments are used. A local feedback loop is instantiated through these local simulations, which lowers the system’s dependence on the network performance. The former control loop, including the network, now becomes a corrective loop to prevent mismatches. This thesis focuses on the part where the local simulation is corrected by the real-life data received over the network. The question is how real-time dynamic environments can be captured and kept track of for use in MMT. We identify accurate tracking of objects in the environment as the critical building block enabling MMT with dynamic objects. Consequently, the first 6 Degrees of Freedom (DoF) tracking application designed for use in TI applications is created and evaluated. Through this research, the first steps are set towards a full-blown MMT system that can capture the remote environment successfully.

The field of Tactile Internet (TI) is transporting physical interactions over vast distances as if they were near. This teleoperation method increases the quality of tele-engineering, telesurgery and many other fields. However, it requires the strict end to end latency constraints of a few ms, which is still out of reach. This thesis looks at the first step of this pipeline, the Human Machine Interface (HMI). We redesign a SenseGlove MK1, A VR haptic feedback glove, to reduce the latency to under 0.5 ms. We then use prediction to have an effective latency of less than -0.8 ms, creating the first Negative Latency Glove. This gives the rest of the TI system a larger latency budget than before.

Tactile internet promises to enable humans to manipulate remote physical environments. The human interacts with the remote environment by manipulating a haptic device. Recently, research effort into tactile internet and haptic devices has seen a significant increase. However replicating one aspect of executing an action, feeling textures, is still in its infancy. Current devices that can portray texture are severely limited, which also interferes with the ability to research the topic. In this thesis, we propose a novel device that can realistically portray textures to the fingertip, and respond to displacement in real-time. We call this a Haptic Texture Device (HTD). The design features custom actuators, with low latency < 0.6ms and at least 50mN per mm2 of pushing force. The actuators are placed in a grid with a 2.0mmpitch at the fingertip. TheHaptic TextureDevice (HTD) can be moved over a 2D surface. Movement of the HTD results in real-time updates to the portrayed texture to reflect the displacement. The end-to-end delay between displacement and update of the texture was measured to be 17 ms. However, we demonstrated that the theoretical limit of the end-to-end delay could bewell below1 ms, by making use of higher quality displacement sensor. Readily available heightmaps are used as a source of texture data. Because a method for characterizing the performance hitherto did not exist, a novel benchmark was developed that incorporates realistic textures and human participants. The results of our benchmarking yielded an average score of 61%. Since the device is the first of its kind, it cannot be compared to similar devices yet, but it can be used as a starting point on which future HTDs can improve.

Platooning is an application of autonomous driving in which the vehicles travel linearly following each other. The benefits of such driving are many-fold, primarily it increases the traffic throughput and also reduces fuel consumption as the result of minimized drag experienced by the vehicles. The state-of-the-art technologies to achieve platooning involve vehicle-to-vehicle communication for receiving all the events instantaneously. However, wireless channels being prone to communication losses pose risks to the platoon operation. Therefore, it is important to study how platoons operate under communication losses. Platoons being vehicular ad-hoc networks, the information dissemination is governed by Time Division Multiple Access policies known as Information Flow Topology (IFT). Platooning being sensitive to communication losses, during an emergency braking, the requirements are even more stringent as it could lead to rear-end collisions within the vehicles.

All the performance evaluation are done on a newly designed testbed which is both cost-effective and customizable. Several kinds of IFTs have been developed in recent years. We consider four of the predominant ones and evaluate their performance during emergency braking with temporary communication loss. Since the decrease in inter-vehicle distances is the main reason for vehicle collisions during platoon, we use it as a key performance indicator when evaluating the performance. To improve the reliability of communication in the platoon, we propose to adopt an existing methodology in wireless networking and combine it with the IFTs in platooning. We additionally show the improvement in the collision probability with this method. We conclude our work with limitations and further improvements.