A group of universities have come together with the aim of designing and developing Small Aperture Robotic Telescopes (SmART) for use by students to observe variable stars and transient follow-ups. The group is deliberating on the components of the robotic system; e.g. the telescope, the mount, the back-end camera, control software, and their integration keeping in mind the scientific objectives. The prototype might then be replicated by all the participating universities to provide round the clock observations from sites spread evenly in longitude across the globe. Progress made so far is reported in this paper.

We introduce a code called tlc s05, to fit sparsely sampled JHK band Cepheid light curve data with template light curves to derive the mean magnitude. A brief description of the code is provided here. We tested the performance of the code in deriving the mean JHK band magnitudes using simulations, and we found that it is better to observe more than four evenly spaced data points per light curve, which permits tlc s05 to derive accurate mean magnitudes for Cepheid JHK band light curves.