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Fakultät für Elektrotechnik und Informationstechnik
Persons standing with two drones in front of them © TU Dortmund

6G Network-Robotics Control Co-Design @ German Robotics Conference 2026 & Robocup Germany 2026

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© ComNets Dortmund
Manuel Patchou configuring the Robocup Rescue wireless communication challenge
© ComNets Dortmund
Kevin Sabanovic explaining our 6G Digital Twin based semantic teleoperation solution
ComNets Dortmund contributed recent research results from the 6G transfer hub 6GEM+ and DRZ (German Rescue Robotics Centre), highlighting the importance of jointly designing communication networks and robotic control systems.

Great to see robotics and reliable wireless communications coming closer together at the German Robotics Conference 2026 in Cologne organized by the Robotics Institute Germany (RIG).
In an interactive session on Thursday morning, following the keynote by BMFTR Minister Dorothee Bär, ComNets Dortmund researcher Kevin Sabanovic demonstrated our Gamification Platform for evaluating 6G-enabled teleoperation. 

The research illustrates how tightly coupled wireless communication performance and robotic system behavior are in teleoperation scenarios: our Digital Twin–based 6G semantic communication approach, developed in 6GEM+, shows promising results: user experiments indicate a significantly improved Quality of Experience for teleoperators, while at the same time achieving much higher resource efficiency than traditional video-based teleoperation. The full scientific results will be presented at IEEE ICC 2026 in Glasgow this June. 

At the same time, RoboCup Germany took place alongside the conference—another excellent environment to advance communication-aware robotics.
Here, Manuel Patchou from our ComNets Dortmund team provided a dedicated Wireless Communication Challenge within the RoboCup Rescue competition which is hosted by the DRZ. This communication-related challenge has already been applied and continuously refined across several national and international RoboCup Rescue competitions. Participating teams receive extra points if they accept emulated communication degradation and still manage to teleoperate their rescue robot successfully. 

It was great to meet many colleagues from the robotics and 6G communities.

Both 6GEM+ and DRZ are kindly supported by funding from BMFTR.

Related upcoming publication:

  • K. Šabanović, H. Schippers, K. Heimann, C. Wietfeld, "QoE Benchmarking of Resilient 6G Teleoperation: VR Digital Twin vs. Video Streaming," in IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), Glasgow, Scotland, May 2026. (Accepted) [pdf] [Details]
     
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