Remote Triggered Lab for Robotics: Architecture, Design and Implementation Challenges

On-line education is being revolutionized by new technologies, capable of reaching millions of people with the ultimate promise of education for everyone and everywhere. With this change in trend, online laboratories are gaining popularity due to their accessibility, cost and state of the art infrastructure. The Remote Triggered Lab infrastructure for robotics is one such online laboratory for robotics and electromechanical systems domain. In this paper, we discuss about lab infrastructure, architecture, challenges faced during design, implementation and deployment along with proposed and implemented solutions. The challenges of the Remote Triggered Lab are unique: with remote triggered electromechanical motion being involved. In addition, audio/video feedback is provided to the user since it provides a clear idea of mechanical motion capability of robots. A novel robot emulator designed using bank of shafts is a unique facility in the Remote Triggered Lab to learn and simulate complex robots remotely. Challenges faced during the development of this lab infrastructure are also discussed in this paper.