Tracking Physics: A Virtual Platform for 3D Object Tracking in Tactile Internet Applications

Abstract

Tactile Internet (TI) is a pioneering network paradigm that aims to communicate haptic feedback with ultra-low latency. It will enable new ways for us to interact with remote environments, such as transferring skills over the network and controlling remote objects. One crucial component of this framework is the ability to track the position and movement of remote objects. While there are many tracking algorithms, evaluating them in TI applications can be time-consuming, expensive, and sometimes impractical. Hence, we present a virtual platform for developing, evaluating, and comparing tracking solutions. We demonstrate how our platform can be used to tune tracking algorithms and determine trade-offs between different types of hardware. In turn, this provides insights that were previously difficult to obtain using real physical platforms, as real world coordinates may not align with virtual coordinates and experiments are not easily repeatable.