Interactive remote controlled labs

Pros of Remote Labs There are many advantages of deploying a remote engineering laboratory in an educational environment. Such a strategy provides a way to provide more hands on time for engineering students in an efficient, flexible and cost effective manner. This is especially true for electrical engineering departments that may have limited access to laboratories and higher cost test equipment in particular. One of the main benefits of a remote lab strategy is a more efficient utilization of equipment. Labs can be accessed during ‘off hours’ when the instrumentation would otherwise be sitting idle. It also gives students more flexibility to schedule their labs. Students can get lab time virtually any time of day or night. And with the proliferation of LAN access on today’s campuses, students benefit from the convenience and safety of remote access from virtually any university location. And unlike a virtual instrument strategy that relies on simulated labs, a remote strategy gives e...

LabVIEW® virtual instrumentation has been the primary used tool, and this software has become a powerful resource for the development of e-learning environments, particularly at the development stage. A laptop computer equipped with LabVIEW® software is located at the actual laboratory where the experiment is performed. This is the server computer where the virtual instruments are developed for the control of the experiment execute.  Additional hardware was employed for the implementation of the system, namely a data acquisition (DAQ) board and a webcam, both connected to USB ports of the server computer, as well as signal conditioning circuits for the conversion of software instructions into the required power actions on the laboratory equipment. The webcam allows video communication with the laboratory, displaying images through the computer interface in order to monitor the experiment. Using the LabVIEW® web server, the experiment is available on the Internet, and it can be acce...

Laboratory classes play a crucial role in engineering schools. Good pedagogical reasons, such as illustrating and validating analytical concepts, introducing students to professional practice and to the uncertainties involved in non-ideal situations, developing skills with instrumentation, and developing social and teamwork skills in a technical environment motivate the need for their inclusion in the curriculum.  On the other hand, laboratory management can be resource-intensive and expensive, since it requires qualified staff and continuous equipment maintenance and evolution, so that the number of laboratories is often limited, also due to economic factors. Also, for these reasons, the adoption of alternative access modes (e.g., remote laboratories) is more and more considered by universities. Remote labs, in fact, can extend the capability of a conventional laboratory by increasing the number of times and places a student can perform experiments, and extending its availability ...