Education in robotics by means of PC's

The authors have been involved over some years in Educaton in Robotics in Austrian Universities. In addition to lectures, seminar as well as laboratory courses are offered for students of different fields of interest. For these purposes some software packages were developed at both Universities. The paper starts with a short summary of results of a report completed by the working group "Education in Robotics and Manufacturing" of the IFAC-EDOCOM. In the following, several software packages illustrating kinematics and kinetics, conventional and "advanced" control algorithms of robots are shortly described and discussed. Two new programming languages - ROBASIC and ROPASCAL - developed mainly for educational purposes will be also described.