Web-Based Laboratory on Robotics: Remote vs. Virtual Training in Programming Manipulators

Abstract

It is widely accepted that, in all engineering education disciplines, well-designed practical training scenarios in realistic experimental laboratory set-ups are needed to complete students’ education. Hands-on laboratory experimentation is, indeed, essential to enhance and complete classroom lectures and theoretical teaching. Illustrating analytical techniques, assimilating theoretical concepts, introducing students to professional practice and to the uncertainties involved in real experiments, as well as developing skills including teamwork in technical environments, are some of the reasons that make laboratory classes pedagogically indispensable in engineering curricula. Quite often, though, access to expensive and complex laboratory equipment imposes inevitably many constraints, both in terms of time and space limitations. Remote and/or virtual laboratories could provide some solutions to these constraints, offering different alternatives to overcome such limitations by giving students access to laboratory infrastructure in ways that would otherwise be impossible to consider.