Breaking the lab's walls. Tele-laboratories at the University of Pisa

In this paper we describe work being done at our Department to make the Robotics laboratory accessible to students and colleagues, to execute and watch real-time experiments at any time and from anywhere. We describe few different installations, and highlight the underlying philosophy, which is aimed at enlarging the lab in all the dimensions of space, time, and available resources, through the use of Internet technologies.

1 Introduction

In the recent past, Internet and WWW technologies have been impacting robotics rather profoundly under many regards. In the first place, and most basically, their immense popularity attracted the interest of common people to advanced technologies, which in part explains the renewed vigor of Robotics (widely felt as a companion technology to computers and the internet), and the new expectations and challenges posed by the society to Robotics research.