Virtual laboratories and remote access to experimental hardware have become feasible with the advent of high-level web-based languages and communication protocols. In this paper, we introduce an international co-operation, the principal objective of which is to develop such a laboratory for tele-education and research in aerospace and mechatronics. The project involves several universities in Canada and Europe, each offering a test facility for the laboratory. The paper describes in detail the hardware, system architecture and experiments developed at one of the nodes of the virtual laboratory, the Planar Robotics facility at the University of Victoria.