NETROLAB: a networked laboratory for robotics education

Education in Science and Engineering relies heavily on reinforcing the theoretical concepts learned in the classroom by means of practical demonstration and experimentation. Robotics education suffers in this regard due to the high cost of state-of-the-art robotic equipment and the facilities needed to house it. NETROLAB is a project funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) under its `New Technology Initiative´ to provide a resource for the teaching of Robotics and AI which can be accessed by the widest possible user base. It aims to achieve this by exploiting the SuperJANET network and the new multimedia workstation technology to provide remote access for educators and students to a shared set of robotics resources. NETROLAB is being developed jointly by the Department of Computer Science at the University of Reading and the Department of Manufacturing Engineering at the University of Nottingham