A Review on Multimodal Communications for Human-Robot Collaboration in 5G: from Visual to Tactile

Abstract

With collaborative advances in wireless communication, artificial intelligence (AI), and sensor technologies,robotic systems are undergoing a revolutionary evolution from single-function actuators to intelligent taskprocessing platforms. In complex dynamic environments, the limitations of conventional unimodal perceptionhave become increasingly apparent, struggling to meet the precision requirements for object attribute recognitionand environmental interaction. In the future, deep-integrated multimodal perception technologies will emergeas a predominant trend, where cross-modal communication between vision and tactile sensing represents acritical breakthrough direction for enhancing robotic environmental cognition. Currently, research on multimodalvisual-tactile communication remains scarce. Therefore, this paper conducts a comprehensive survey of thisemerging field. First, this paper systematically summarizes mature video and tactile communication frameworks.Subsequently, this paper analyzes current implementations of single-modal streaming transmission for visualand 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 itstransformative potential to enable context-aware robotic manipulation and adaptive human-robot collaboration.