A review on multimodal communications for human-robot collaboration in 5G: from visual to tactile

Abstract

With collaborative advances in wireless communication, artificial intelligence, and sensor technologies, robotic systems are undergoing a revolutionary evolution from single-function actuators to intelligent task processing platforms. In complex dynamic environments, the limitations of conventional unimodal perception have become increasingly apparent, struggling to meet the precision requirements for object attribute recognition and environmental interaction. In the future, deep-integrated multimodal perception technologies will emerge as a predominant trend, where cross-modal communication between vision and tactile sensing represents a critical breakthrough direction for enhancing robotic environmental cognition. Currently, research on multimodal visual-tactile communication remains scarce. Therefore, this paper conducts a comprehensive survey of this emerging field. First, this paper systematically summarizes mature video and tactile communication frameworks. Subsequently, this paper analyzes current implementations of single-modal streaming transmission for visual and tactile data, thereby investigating the state-of-the-art in multimodal visual-tactile communication. Finally, this paper briefly explores the promising prospects of visual-tactile communication technology, highlighting its transformative potential to enable context-aware robotic manipulation and adaptive human-robot collaboration.