UniBot Remote Laboratory: A Scalable Web-Based Set-up for Education and Experimental Activities in Robotics Raffaele Grandi * Riccardo Falconi * Claudio Melchiorri * * Department of Electronics, Computer Sciences and Systems (DEIS), University of Bologna, Italy. {raffaele.grandi, riccardo.falconi, claudio.melchiorri}@unibo.it Abstract: 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. Keywords: Education and training, Web-based tele-laboratory, Robotics, Human-robot interaction, Remote programming. 1. INTRODUCTION There are no doubts about the importance of laboratory’s ex- periences, for education, in several engineering fields [Wolf 2010]. This is a consequence of the fact that, while students learn new concepts during classes, they need to test their abili- ties on real systems, in order to fix and prove their knowledge. Although the ideal situation should be to have an experimental set-up for each student, and possibly for each class of control problems, this is not possible, due to a number of practical reasons: • each set-up is typically sold in bundle with its own teach- ing software, thus it may be difficult to modify it in order to implement set-ups other than the ones suggested by the dealer; • each student, before using every experimental set-up, should understand the entire architecture of the system, and sometimes this may require more efforts than solving the problem for which the set-up has been made available; • the financial effort for the maintenance of a large number of experimental set-ups is not indifferent. Different experimental set-ups are provided by different com- panies, thus generally it may result quite complex also to inter- face or connect them together. It follows that it could be difficult to create a complex student lab without a great effort in order to re-engineering all these systems. In recent years, starting from this simple considerations, many papers, that focus on low cost experimental set-ups, have been presented in literature, spacing in a wide range of different applications, from automation control [Casini et al. 2003] to robotics [Fernandez and Casals 2004]. In fact, due to the increased computational power of personal computers, it has been possible to create small low-cost set-ups, built with off- the-shelf components, whose teaching potentialities can be compared with more expensive and performing systems. In parallel, the recent diffusion of high bandwidth internet con- nections and the rapid development of web-based technologies, leads to a new concept of laboratory experience. In fact, the cur- rent generation of laboratory facilities has been implemented in order to allow the remote access to a real experimental set-up [Swamy et al. 2002],[McKee 2002]. This means that students can experience the effects of their control programs on real machines, without the need to be physically present, e.g. by us- ing a web-cam to observe the behaviour of the real system and collecting data to be analysed later on their own computer. Most of these labs use a web-based interface where the students, after authentication, can choose the experiment to be performed, and reserve a time-slot, for their own purposes. Some of them pro- vide the possibility to create a Matlab/Simulink control scheme to be uploaded and executed. Nevertheless, all these virtual labs are strictly limited by many factors, in principle the fact that no local supervisor is usually implemented in the set-up, and the system must be safety and open-loop stable, to prevent faults, due to an inefficient uploaded controller. Focusing the discussion on robotics labs, to our knowledge, some of the first robotic remote laboratories have been implemented by Calkin et al. [1998] and by Taylor et al. [1999], where the user can not strictly control the manipulator, but can only define a sequence of movements that are then computed by the local robot con- troller. Even if these results could be considered milestones for remote robotics labs, in order to provide students with a more involving experience, more efforts should be devoted to the implementation of a flexible and user-friendly environments. As we describe in the following sections, we have created a Preprints of the 18th IFAC World Congress Milano (Italy) August 28 - September 2, 2011 Copyright by the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) 8521