UniBot Remote Laboratory: A ScalableWeb-Based Set-up for Education and Experimental Activities in Robotics

The direct work on a real set-ups is an important experience for students in control theory and robotics.On the other hand, for several reasons (space, costs, complexity, etc.), it is not always possible to give students an individual access to laboratory set-ups, for their practical activities. Therefore, in recent years many tele-laboratories have been implemented by different universities, providing experimental set-ups to each student, while minimizing problems related to costs, spaces, and so on. The UniBot Remote Lab has been implemented to provide remote access via TCP connection, to assign to students different time-slots for their experiences, and to reduce the financial effort required by real set-ups. Moreover, the entire framework has been developed with high modularity both from the hardware and software point of view and, even if the basic set-up has been conceived for mobile robotics, different kind of robots or automatic machines can be easily added and be available for experimental activities.