There is substantial effort and research within various disciplines to tackle the current issues and trends in instructional systems and technology that deal with the improvement of computer- and technology-assisted learning settings and environments, online and distance education, technology and cognition, as well as the multicultural and cross-cultural aspects of instructional technology and learning. The Handbook of Research on Instructional Systems and Technology addresses these issues by providing information on the different styles of instructional design methodologies, tips, and strategies on how to use technology to facilitate active learning as well as techniques to help faculty and researchers develop online instructional and teaching materials. This Handbook of Research enables libraries to provide a foundational reference to meet the information needs of researchers, educators, practitioners, administrators, and all other stakeholders in the context of instructional systems and technology.

Handbook of Research on Instructional Systems and Technology

Although access to remote laboratory equipment through a networking infrastructure is becoming an actively investigated and experimented topic, most current implementations are dedicated to specific application environments. Nonetheless, essentially the same basic structure, in terms of protocol and software architecture, can be used to face a great deal of heterogeneous experimental settings. The variability in the resources available to users, both in terminal and access network capabilities, requires a high degree of flexibility, abstraction, application independence, and ease of configuration in the user's access devices. A further aspect regards the possible need of distributing the experiment's results to a large user population, which calls for the adoption of multicasting. This paper reports the architecture developed and the results achieved within the three-year term LABNET project, which has addressed these issues within an integrated laboratory environment, aimed at providing unified access to heterogeneous equipment for a multiplicity of users with potentially different capabilities and skills

LABNET: Towards Remote Laboratories With Unified Access

This study presents development of the system architecture to perform laboratory experiments over the Internet for electrical engineering education. Design and implementation of four-quadrant speed control experiment for a direct current (DC) motor is given in the article as a sample remote experimental study. The system designed consists of four main parts as a client, a server, a data acquisition unit and an experimental set with a control unit. MATLAB web server (MWS) is used to send and receive data or graphics over the Internet. While the experiment is being operated, the real experimental set placed in the laboratory can be monitored by the remote user. Evaluation results show that the system designed accelerates the learning period, increases the concentration on the experiment and provides a safe environment for four-quadrant speed control experiment of

A remote laboratory experiment for 4-quadrant control of a DC motor

The main goal of research presented in this paper was to develop an effective tool for remote voice control of robotized cells. This goal has been achieved by proper combination of two techniques: automatic speech recognition and web-based remote control of robotized cells. Comprehensive analysis of existing solutions related to the control with voice commands and those related to the web-based remote control has been performed. Usually the above mentioned topics are dealt with separately. Only few works tried to cope with the problem of how to combine solutions in these two areas. None of them was aimed at industrial applications. Unlike those works, my research is focused on remote voice control of industrial robotized cells. Besides, my approach does not presume application of a small set of simple pre-defined voice commands but it is based on the use of quasi-natural language instead. The main result of this research was the architecture of industrially oriented remote voice control system. Theoretical considerations have been practically verified in the laboratory. According to my knowledge, this laboratory implementation is the first-ever industrially oriented operational remote voice control system based on commands in quasi-natural language.

Web-based remote voice control of robotized cells

The purpose of designing a controller for a teleoperation system is achieving stability and optimal operation in the presence of factors such as time delay, system disturbance and modeling errors. In this article three new schemes for teleoperation systems are suggested using an optimal control to reduce the error of tracking between the master and slave systems. In the first scheme optimal controller has been designed in both the master and slave subsystems and by a suitable combination of the output signals of both controllers and exerting it to the slave, it has tried to create the best performance with regard to tracking. In the second scheme, as in the first one, optimal controller is applied to both the master and slave systems and the output of each controller is then applied to its own system, and by changing the system parameters and weighting factors, it has tried to reduce the tracking error between the master and the slave subsystems. In the third structure optimal control is applied to the master. In all three structures the positions of master–slave are compared together and controlling signals are applied to the master or slave so that they can track each other in the least possible time. In all schemes the effectiveness of the system is shown through the simulations and they are compared with each other.

Cai Meng

Papers

A low-cost internet-based telerobotic system for access to remote laboratories