A Ubiquitous Computing Platform - Affordable Telepresence Robot Design and Applications

Online universities are growing and they have to continuously integrate new technologies to provide remote students with ubiquitous learning. How to conduct lab work becomes a great challenge in distance education. Existing methods to deal with lab work in distance education institutions usually require students to travel to the actual university laboratory or the nearest located laboratories or be lent lab kits by the university. This is not perfect and can be costly to the universities and students. One possible novel solution would be to use telepresence robots as avatars for remote lab work. To investigate this novel application of telepresence robots, we built an affordable robot and we provide an application scenario, the affordable telepresence robot for remote lab as a case study. This paper will mainly focus on the design and applications of affordable telepresence robot that provides a ubiquitous computing platform for the remote lab solution in distance education.