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Robotic arms are widely used in the industry, research and even in some consumer products. They are used to automate movements or to substitute humans for various reasons. These can be hazardous environment, for example radiation, extreme heat, lack of oxygen; or other factors, like long travel time as in case with the robotic arm of a Mars rover. In both cases, it is crucial to allow controlling the arm from the distance. The solution described in this research uses a cloud service to connect the client software and the device itself. The client application then can be deployed to computers, tablets, even mobile phones with internet access.

In education today distance education students can easily integrate into almost all types of classes except when it comes to laboratory measurements. The laboratory measurements require physical presence of the student in the laboratory. When physical presence of the students is not possible the only way to perform the measurements is to alter the exercises to compensate for deficiency in equipment for remote access which results in separate exercises for distance education students. The purpose of this research was to find ways to integrate the distance education students into the laboratory for mechatronical measurements, without the physical presence or altering the laboratory exercise so regular and distance education students can attend to the same classes. The equipment is comprised of web cameras, National Instruments hardware and graphical user interface for remote access.

The development of science and the technology allowed significant enhancements to the methods in presentation of new materials to students. The processors and available memory in time has become smaller, faster, cheaper and power efficient. This development opened the way for the creation of the mobile devices with the graphical and sound interfaces in order to simplify and enhance the communication between the people and the machines. Additional adjustment to this hardware, primarily dictated by the software, led to the possibility of improving the methods and the speed in which the students absorb the new knowledge. The advantage of this approach lies in the fact that the anchor point in education was transferred from the mere observation of the lecture presentation to the active participation in the aggregation of the new material.