Yuqian Lu on 1News about AI, Robots and 5G

Dr. Yuqian Lu was interviewed by 1News reporter Logan Church about how a 5G-enabled environment can accelerate productivity in conjunction with AI and robotics, and how 5G technology could possibly enable real-time robot control from the cloud.

In 2021, Dr Lu received a seed grant from SfTI National Science Challenge titled 'Ultra-reliable time-sensitive industrial control in the cloud' — a project combining automation, AI, and 5G communication to improve robotic control in industrial settings, in collaboration with Spark and Nokia.

Today, industrial robots communicate via wired connections between a local controller and the robot body. This ensures precise, time-sensitive movement. However, if this communication could instead happen wirelessly in the cloud, it could offer incredible opportunities.

"Imagine if one day, we could have the world's top surgeon based in the US remotely operating on a patient in Auckland Hospital via robots. Or a fleet of industrial robots are centrally managed remotely." — Dr Yuqian Lu

"The critical piece of the SfTI research is to develop smart algorithms that can compensate for issues that may occur even during 5G data transmission — so that, from an application perspective, a robot can move smoothly, in a time-sensitive way."