Toward Wireless Human-Machine Collaboration in the 6G Era

The next industrial revolution, Industry 5.0, will be driven by advanced technologies that foster human-machine collaboration (HMC). It will leverage human creativity, judgment, and dexterity with the machine’s strength, precision, and speed to improve productivity, quality of life, and sustainability. Wireless communications, empowered by the emerging capabilities of sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks, will play a central role in enabling flexible, scalable, and low-cost deployment of geographically distributed HMC systems. In this article, we first introduce the generic architecture and key components of wireless HMC (WHMC). We then present the network topologies of WHMC and highlight impactful applications across various industry sectors. Driven by the prospective applications, we elaborate on new performance metrics that researchers and practitioners may consider during the exploration and implementation of WHMC and discuss new design methodologies. We then summarize the communication requirements and review promising state-of-the-art technologies that can support WHMC. Finally, we present a proof-of-concept case study and identify several open challenges.