Mixing Reality and Virtual Worlds in an Educational Mobile Robotics Remote Lab

This paper describes MOBOLAB, a project aimed at the construction of a remotely controlled mobile robotics laboratory. MOBOLAB was primarily designed to aid educators who wish to use robotics as an educational tool for pupils ranging from elementary to high school, and who don’t have educational robotic equipment readily available at their place, or who wish to use a standardized environment offering several useful features to enhance their teaching activity. MOBOLAB also offers other interesting usage possibilities, such as on-line training of educators, student robotic competitions, etc. Although far from being complete (in fact, MOBOLAB was designed as an ever-expanding project), some interesting results have already been obtained from practical experiments performed with pupils and educators.