This award, in the Small Grants for Exploratory Research mode, provides seed funding for initial exploration of a national virtual laboratory (NVL) in robotics research. The Laboratory will take advantage of the emerging National Information Infrastructure by connecting research facilities across the country to design joint experiments in robotics. These will be geographically distributed experiments, using different agents at separate sites, such that perception/action modules will interact physically with their local environments, but will communicate over the network to coordinate their accomplishment of a common task. Initially the NVL will develop an infrastructure for sharing resources among geographically distributed university and industry research laboratories. This infrastructure will consist of communication capabilities for video, voice and data links offering high-quality real-time excange and remote operation capabilities. This will enable the researchers to share and test all their software and hardware resources under diverse environmental conditions.
