LabsLand: A sharing economy platform to promote educational remote laboratories maintainability, sustainability and adoption

A remote laboratory is a software and hardware tool that enables students to access real equipment located somewhere else through the Internet. The laboratories are typically deployed in universities or research centers. A key factor of remote laboratories is that once they are available through the Internet their usage can be scaled up and used by students of other institutions. Thus, two or more institutions can share different equipment to reduce costs. Furthermore, this enables a sharing economy where multiple providers provide access to their laboratories to each other, freely or not. However, while the number of remote laboratory initiatives is high, the overall impact of these laboratories is fairly limited beyond the scope of the host institution or the scope (and duration) of projects in which the host institution is involved. The focus of this contribution is to outline a novel initiative addressing this scaling problem. After over 10 years working on the area our research group has started a spin-off focused on this topic, called LabsLand. A key factor of this spin-off is to provide a platform similar to other sharing economy marketplaces, aiming to provide features commonly ignored in the remote laboratories literature such as trust, accurate reliability or different pricing schemes for different scenarios.