REAL: a virtual laboratory for mobile robot experiments

Abstract

This paper presents REAL (Remotely Accessible Laboratory), a virtual laboratory accessible through the Internet. The objective of REAL is to provide remote access to a mobile robots infrastructure. REAL has been implemented as a new generation telecommunication service, not as a commonplace World Wide Web (WWW) application. As such, it employs a sophisticated access framework, a communication infrastructure able to support multimedia flows, and a component-based software construction. The architecture of REAL relies on open standards, such as WWW and its related technologies (HTTP, HTML, XML, Java, etc.) and a common object request broker architecture (CORBA).