Interactive Robotics Using the Internet

We report on a project currently under way within the department of Computer Science at the University of Reading exploiting networking and multimedia technology to provide a shared robotics laboratory on the Internet. The laboratory is for use by our own students and students at other Higher Education (HE) institutions in the UK. We present a mobile robot system we have developed to support teaching, and we describe how the Internet is being used to provide and control access to the robot. A case study is presented illustrating the use of the mobile robot in student project work. The key goal of the work we are pursuing is the provision of robots as networked resources similar to other computing resources, in this way making them accessible to many more students than would otherwise be able to gain access to this advanced technology.