Nowadays, Internet has become a powerful tool in the field of education. The students are highly motivated to make use of the resources available in remote environments through Internet. The remote laboratories allow the students to become accustomed with real tools and equipments, accessing from their own home, with a free timetable and without requiring the physical presence of neither the professor nor the student. Also, they acquire a special relevance in the process of adaptation of the studies to the European Space of Higher Education. The new system is centred in the learning of the students, trying to boost their autonomy. It reduces the time the lecturer spends presenting theoretical concepts, and it is expected to be a more flexible system with the timetables. With these features, the remote laboratories will definitely help us to establish this new system in the technical studies.

This work presents a distributed platform that allows monitoring and controlling a team of mobile robots through Internet. It has been developed in such a way that permits the students to make use of the different types of mobile robots available in the physical laboratory in a transparent way, without a deep knowledge of the robot architecture. All the robots can be accessed using the same graphical interface and the same methods, independently of the operative system the student uses and with a minimal installation in the student PC. The main goal is that the students can test the algorithms they develop to control the robot in a real robotic platform.

To make possible that the students can work with all the robots using the same methods, a specific protocol has been designed using CORBA (Control Object Request Broker Architecture), which has proved to be a very efficient and robust standard for the implementation of distributed applications.

At the moment, there are three different environments available. Each environment is composed by a WifiBot mobile robot and a camera that offers a general view of the environment where the robot moves. Each robot is equipped with a colour camera, two infrared sensors, odometry system and four independent motors. This way, three different students can access the system simultaneously to test their algorithms.

The students have at their disposal the information about the available robots and the services each robot offers. Also, they have several templates that show how they can use the methods implemented (read sensors, capture images or move the robot). The client application can run on any computer, independently of its architecture and operative system, and it has been implemented using the reference model of Java Web Start. This technology permits running Java applications that reside in a web server. Through this application, the students are able to connect to the robot, move it, monitor the state of the sensors, upload the program they have developed to control the robot, compile and run it in the remote environment.

Thanks to this platform, the students are able to carry out some practices on mobile robotics in a real environment. They can study robots with different kinematics, try to avoid obstacles using the laser measures, perform a visual localization or navigation, study the properties of the odometer data and also test algorithms that imply collaboration between robots. Besides they can visualize the evolution of the task thanks to the cameras installed along the environment.