5G-enhanced Teleoperation in Real-Life Port Environments: Lessons Learned from the 5G-Blueprint Project
The challenge of ensuring safety in autonomous driving or sailing involves predicting and replicating various potential scenarios on roads and waterways, posing difficulties and high costs. In response, the European project 5G-Blueprint addresses this by introducing a complementary technology, i.e., teleoperation, which leverages 5G connectivity to enable human interventions in complex situations beyond autonomous capabilities, thereby removing the physical link between the human operator and the remotely controlled vehicle/vessel. This operational mode brings stringent connectivity requirements, including high uplink bandwidth for transmitting video streams from onboard cameras to the teleoperation center, low latency, and an ultra-reliable connection for relaying commands from the teleoperator to the remote vehicle/vessel. Additionally, it emphasizes minimal interruption time when the teleoperated vehicle/vessel crosses international borders, ensuring seamless connectivity and uninterrupted remote operation. Therefore, this paper summarizes extensive evaluations of network and service performance, highlighting key results across pilot locations and providing conclusions and analysis of 5G-enhanced teleoperation in various use cases. Additionally, it outlines lessons learned from pilot activities.