Telepresence Robot Enable Remote Lab in Distance Education

Abstract

How to conduct lab work in distance education creates a new paradigm shift for online universities. This thesis proposes the use of telepresence robots for remote lab work. There are three main contributions in this thesis. The first contribution is the development of a telepresence robot that is the main component of the telepresence robot based ubiquitous computing platform. The one developed gives an example of affordability, scalability, compatibility, and customizable for the applications. The second contribution is the design and implementation of the telepresence robot system architecture. This telepresence robot system architecture provides an implementable framework for the research, particularly focusing on the telepresence robot implementation for remote lab in distance learning. The third contribution is the validation process of the developed telepresence robot based ubiquitous computing platform under the distance educational scenarios. This contribution tests the feasibility of using such a telepresence robot in a remote lab environment.