Online robotic experiments for tele-education at the university of pisa

In this paper we describe work being done at our department to make the robotics laboratory accessible to students and colleagues to execute and watch real-time experiments at any time and from anywhere. We describe a few different installations and highlight the underlying philosophy, which is aimed at enlarging the lab in all the dimensions of space, time, and available resources, through the use of Internet technologies. In particular, four experimental setups with hardware and software architecture description are presented: the dc motor, the magnetic levitator, the nonholomonic motion planner (NHMP), and the graphic environment tool. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.