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good at anyway. On the other side are some who believe that robots may take the place of humans in manufacturing and other industries, eliminating millions of jobs. Whether or not robots will ultimately look down their artificial noses at humans remains to be seen, but 5G is almost certain to let them function more efficiently and serve more applications than ever before. Robots are already ubiquitous in manufacturing, of which the auto industry is perhaps the most obvious example. Other key applications examples include industrial and medical. The innovations within 5G will expand their capabilities so much further that it will be necessary to expand the definition of what a robot really is. So when autonomous vehicles finally hit the streets, they too will be robots, executing instructions from a vast array of sensors to make decisions and perform functions, presumably a lot more accurately, reliably, and faster than humans. Gyrocopters and other unmanned vehicles fit this category too. To understand the synergy between 5G and robotics, there is no better example than healthcare, where robotics has immense potential. Not only will robots perform mundane functions such as transferring things from place to place in a hospital, aided by 5G communications and the cloud, but they will also enable telesurgery in which operations are orchestrated remotely by doctors and performed locally by robots. This was demonstrated for the first time back in 2001 when endocrine surgeon Jacques Marescaux (1948–) removed the gallbladder of a patient in Strasbourg, France while sitting at a console in New York City—a distance approximately 6,200km away—during an event appropriately called Operation Lindbergh. Flip forward to about 2025 and imagine operating rooms in one hospital populated by robots and humans connected by 5G through the cloud to surgeons anywhere on Earth who orchestrate the surgical procedures. They could be aided by specialists in one or more locations who can lend their expertise, all in real time. Fantastic though this may seem, it's just the beginning: Using virtual reality (VR)—and the ever-present cloud—it should be possible to convert an imaging scan into a virtual, three-dimensional (3D) representation of a patient. Using this "digital clone", the surgeon would then remotely orchestrate the operation on a virtualization of the patient while one or more robots perform the actual surgery. The doctor would have a tactile yet virtual "experience" as bones, tissue, and organs will all "feel" differently. The full measure of telesurgery won't be possible for perhaps a decade but will continue to advance in stages as 5G and robotics mature. So Why Not Now? Besides the fact that the robots and the entire "ecosystem" required to enable telesurgery and other next-generation robotic applications are still in their infancy, current 4G networks simply do not have the characteristics required to make them possible. That is, as they require virtually instantaneous response times, it will be essential to reduce a metric called latency to unprecedented levels. Latency is basically the time span between when input is initiated at one point in a communications link and when it returns with error-free input from another point. Low latency is vital for high reliability machine-centric communication for robotics of tomorrow. Current 4G Long-Term Evolution (LTE) cellular networks have round-trip latency of about 50ms, but to enable applications like robotics the 5G standard recognizes that <1ms will be required, a colossal technical challenge. Other promised benefits of 5G, such as cloud computing and increasing data rates, are relatively "simple" when compared to reducing latency to such a minute level, as it faces the immutable laws of physics. To understand this, consider that the speed of electromagnetic radiation in a vacuum is 3 x 10 8 m/s. As the Earth's atmosphere is not a vacuum, this top speed is reduced ever so slightly due to atmospheric air. However, its propagation speed is dramatically reduced by further considerations, including the optical fibers, terrestrial and satellite communication links, and the electronics and interconnects through which a signal must pass. The upshot is that the shorter the physical distance between Point A and Point B, the lower latency time can be. This is how 5G intends to accomplish its goal of reducing this metric to <1ms. 5G will require the number of data centers that collectively form the cloud to be dramatically expanded geographically, as a data center in one location is likely to be too far away from most other locations to reduce latency time to acceptable levels. This expansion, combined with data rates greater than 1Gb/s and the use of new cellular frequencies—an order of magnitude higher than those presently employed—will be essential ingredients that allow distances ranging from 1–100km to be covered with <1ms latency. The Factory, Reimagined 5G will play a crucial role in creating the factory of the future, another application in which <1ms latency is essential (Figure 1). In combination with the almost limitless processing and data storage available in the cloud, 5G communications will allow robots in next-generation manufacturing environments to do far more than they can today. Robots will be able to exchange large amounts of information between themselves and the factory workforce, revolutionizing the "shop floor" along with other 5G enabled devices such as wearables and technologies like augmented reality (AR). | 17 |

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