The Remote Exploration Program: a collaborative outreach approach to robotics education

High-school robotics competitions of all sorts are hugely popular. Robotics courses are now being widely taught in colleges and universities. Commercial applications of robotics are growing, as it becomes practical to deploy autonomous systems in the real world. Despite the activity in each of these areas, there is a lack of continuity between them. In this paper, we describe our plans for a novel outreach and education program that attempts to bridge between the worlds of high-school, university, and research laboratory robotics.