A remote experiment system on robot vehicle control for engineering educations based on World Wide Web

State-of-the-art Internet technologies allow us to provide advanced and interactive distance education services. On the other hand, teleoperation systems with robot manipulator or vehicle via Internet have been developed in the field of robotics. By fusing two techniques, we can develop a remote experiment system for engineering educations based on World Wide Web, which allows students to take courses on experiments and exercises through the Internet anytime and anywhere they want. Although such remote experiment systems have been recently proposed by using an inverse pendulum, a coupled tank, heat transfer system and so on, they are inflexible because only their control parameters can be accessed by users. In this paper, we propose an unmanned and full-fledged remote experiment system comparable to regular local experiment systems that can provide flexible and effective practices to students, since the users can upload, compile and execute any source codes they create via Internet. The proposed system allows student users to exercise and practice remotely about principles of stepping motor control, image processing and their application to trajectory control for a robot vehicle. In this system, a student user has to prepare only a PC connected to Internet and installed with a browser and a text editor, because all procedures necessary for the experiments can be executed on the server side. Furthermore, this paper reports the results of a questionnaire survey on the proposed system for student users in our department in order to evaluate its effectiveness.