Contents I. Introduction
Internet and Web technologies are changing dramatically the education in robotics and automation. Many distance learning paradigms have been developed in recent years and among these, laboratories accessible through the Internet are certainly the most effective ones. Consider for instance the tele-laboratory developed in [1] or the project described in [2] where an expensive resource, suchas a mobile robot, is shared on the web. Regarding the web technologies usedin robotics and automation courses, exhaustive contributions have been provided in [3], [4] where the authors describe the use of virtual [5] and remote labs in control teaching. A distinguished feature of remote labs with respect to virtual labs is that users can interact with real physical processes through the Internet. The implementation of a remote lab requires in general more efforts. Moreover, the complexity of the hardware and software architecture design increases when the remote lab allows the user to design the controller within the remote web session. This is for instance the case of the remote lab developed at the Oregon StateUniversity [6], where students can remotely control a robot arm not only changing some parameters but, more interestingly, transmitting the control program which changes the dynamics of the closed-loop system.
