Development of an Internet-based Robot Education System

Until now, many networked robots have been connected to the Internet for the various applications. With these networked robots, very long distance teleoperation can be possible through the Internet. However, the promising area of the Internet-based teleoperation may be distance learning, because of several reasons such as the unpredictable characteristics of the Internet. In robotics class, students learn many theories about robots, but it is hard to perform the actual experiments for all students due to the rack of the real robots and safety problems. Some classes may introduce the virtual robot simulator for students to program the virtual robot and upload their program to operate the real robot through the off-line programming method. However, the students may also visit the laboratory when they want to use the real robot for testing their program. In this paper, we developed an Internet-based robot education system. The developed system was composed of two parts, the robotics class materials and the web-based Java3d robot simulator. That is, this system can provide two services for distance learning to the students through the Internet. The robotics class materials can be provided to the student as the multimedia contents on the web page. As well, the web-based robot simulator as the real experiment tool can help the students get good understanding about certain subject. So, the students can learn the required robotics theories and perform the real experiments from their web browser when they want to study themselves at any time.