Pattern-based architecture for building mobile robotics remote laboratories

The building of remote laboratories for laboratory experiments in mobile robots requires expertise in a number of different disciplines, such as Internet programming, telematic and mechatronic systems, etc. Remote laboratories offer students access to complementary experiments, not available at their own university, as support to lectures. An intuitive user interface is required for inexperienced people to control the robot remotely. This paper describes a design pattern-based architecture to build remote laboratories for mobile robotics. The proposed remote laboratory is currently used to provide remote experiments on indoor mobile robotics, addressing different approaches to solve the main problems of mobile robotics, such as sensing, motion control, localization, world modeling, planning, etc. These experiments are being used in several mobile robotics and autonomous systems courses, at the undergraduate and graduate levels.