Remote Laboratories or WebLabs constitute a first-order didactic resource in engineering faculties. However, in many cases, they lack a proper software design, both in the client and server side, which degrades their quality and academic usefulness. This paper presents the main characteristics of a Remote Laboratory, analyzes the software technologies to implement the client and server sides in a WebLab, and correlates these technologies with the characteristics to facilitate the selection of a technology to implement a WebLab. The results obtained suggest the adoption of a Service Oriented Laboratory Architecture-based approach for the design of future Remote Laboratories so that client-agnostic Remote Laboratories and Remote Laboratory composition are enabled. The experience with the real Remote Laboratory, WebLab-Deusto, is also presented.

Addressing Software Impact in the Design of Remote Laboratories

This paper deals with remote access to a real laboratory equipment using contemporary computer and network technology for creating the environment that will enable a remote user to perform the required laboratory exercises and control the laboratory equipment. Architecture and characteristics of WebLab will be described with special attention to the latest implemented laboratory experiment for control of the coupled water tanks (using LabVIEW). This paper will also give results of researches among student population in order to determine advantages and effects of using web laboratory in control engineering education. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 19: 538–549, 2011

A LabVIEW-based remote laboratory experiments for control engineering education

This paper describes the experience gathered in the last years due to the creation and development of an automatic control laboratory suitable for remote use via the Web. First, the principles that guide the laboratory design and evolution are stated and motivated. Then, an overview of the laboratory is given, describing its architecture and the most important technological solutions adopted. The available experiments are described, and some pedagogical considerations are reported. Finally, some general ideas are presented that reflect the authors' experience and opinion on the use of remote laboratories in control education.

Multifunctional Remote Laboratory for Education in Automatic Control: The CrAutoLab Experience

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a remote lab and a web‐based teaching environment which provides access for remote control of Digital Signal Processors (DSP device) and real instrumentation. The framework, named eDSPLab, has been designed using LabVIEW for debugging and testing Digital Signal Processing (DSP) experiments in a real lab without physical and temporal restrictions, and it has been integrated as a service in a modern e‐learning application domain and a Learning Management System (LMS) to reinforce its utility.Design/methodology/approach – A literature review is presented to provide background to the progressive role that DSP and DSP devices play in Information and Communications Technology (ICT)‐demanded job profiles, and the role that a computer‐mediated environment plays in modern teaching methodologies. The web service access control architecture is defined.Findings – The paper provides new insights into the use of the Internet for laboratory teaching.Research limitations/...

eDSPLab: remote laboratory for experiments on DSP applications

This paper describes the current evolution of the telelaboratory facilities at the University of Pisa. In particular, starting from a standard environment providing remote access to a set of experiments, the telelaboratory is now organized as a collection of learning objects, i.e., modular didactic units designed following specific learning objectives within control systems and robotic fields. The telelaboratory has a remote Web-based access which can be used both as a simulation environment and as a remote way of performing real physical experiments. The developed telelaboratory is based on free open-source software such as Scilab/Scicos, Comedi, and real-time application interface patch for Linux kernels. In-house software tools, such as a Java Web hyper modular interface system, graphic environment tools, and a virtual laboratory interface based on Java applets, have been developed as a support for the learning process.

From Remote Experiments to Web-Based Learning Objects: An Advanced Telelaboratory for Robotics and Control Systems

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

Video-coding techniques that are widely used in videoconferencing and streaming applications over the Internet may face degradation in performance when traversing satellite channels. The aim of the present paper is to provide objective measurements of the quality of video-encoded sequences for two of the most popular video coders in this setting [namely, H.261 and moving picture experts group (MPEG)-2], after transmission over faded satellite channels. In particular, the emphasis is on the Ka band, which is becoming an attractive alternative for commercial applications but is more prone to quality degradation than the currently widely used Ku band. In order to test the behavior of the coders in repeatable experimental conditions and over different data link platforms, two transmission chains have been implemented in the laboratory by careful emulation of the required environment. The data link layer has been based on HDLC-like and direct video broadcasting protocols, respectively. The experiments have been performed in the presence of additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and by using fading patterns derived by real-world data. The results obtained highlight some often neglected aspects in the behavior of the coders under examination, both in relation to their comparative performance and to their adaptability to different underlying data link protocols.

An experimental study on the quality-of-service of video encoded sequences over an emulated rain-faded Satellite channel

The possibility to perform distributed measurements, by means of complex tele-laboratory structures, is gaining momentum as a highly relevant aspect in numerous areas, including scientific research in general, environmental monitoring, distance education and training of staff operating over a vast territorial extension. Grid computing architectures or, more generally, service oriented architectures (SOA), viewed as platforms for the integration of distributed resources, play an ever-increasingly significant role, as witnessed by the large number of projects funded by the European Union (EU) on this and related topics. This role is no longer limited to the management of computational resources, and it extends nowadays to the integration of measurement instrumentation and large-scale distributed data acquisition platforms. In such a context, the functionality offered by the grid architecture allows unified control, maintenance, calibration and utilization of “traditional” instrumentation and laboratory equipment, as well as of remote data acquisition probes, by offering the user common standard interfaces and working environments. In this framework, the chapter introduces the design and performance evaluation of a test bench for telecommunication measurement instrumentation, interacting with the grid via the GRIDCC (Grid-enabled Remote Instrumentation with Distributed Control and Computation) middleware.

On The Integration of Telecommunication Measurement Devices Within The Framework Of An Instrumentation Grid

The availability of a wide range of instrumentation that can be remotely controlled, and the possibility to access the Internet with cheap and fast xDSL lines have encouraged the design of tele-measurement platforms by means of which researchers, instructors and students can exploit the facilities offered by complex and expensive laboratories Although the market offers several solutions to remotely manage equipment, little attention has been paid to the hardware and software architectures devoted to distance learning experimental environments The paper presents the architectural approach, and the related implementation, which was proposed and developed within two projects funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, University, and Research (MIUR) Both projects were aimed at building the experimental test-beds, which include very heterogeneous equipment, and at developing an open system architecture for their actual managing Specifically, the attention is focused on the supervising central unit, which represents a crucial and critical element of the system The software implementation of the central unit is described in detail, as concerns both the data structures adopted and the protocol machine The results of some performance tests are shown to highlight the efficiency of the proposed solution

The LABNET-Server Software Architecture For Remote Management Of Distributed Laboratories: Current Status And Perspectives

In the recent years, systems devoted to access remote laboratories through a networking infrastructure have been actively studied, and a number of specific software platforms, able to manage the instrumentation, have been proposed and implemented Nevertheless, the problems involved in controlling remote devices on board satellite laboratories or in accessing remote equipment via satellite links are still not sufficiently investigated The paper briefly introduces the architecture developed within the Labnet project, especially as concerns its core software component, whose aim is providing unified access to heterogeneous equipment for a multiplicity of users Since the use of an earth-to-space link can possible affect the overall performance of systems based on a TCP-IP suite, a number of tests has been carried out, in order to evaluate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed solution Furthermore, the results regarding the performance of the Labnet platform are discussed and compared with those achieved by exploiting the facilities offered by a commercial and very popular software package

Interconnection of Laboratory Equipment via Satellite and Space Links: Investigating the Performance of Software Platforms for the Management of Measurement Instrumentation

Stefano Vignola

Papers

LABNET: Towards Remote Laboratories With Unified Access

An experimental study on the quality-of-service of video encoded sequences over an emulated rain-faded Satellite channel

On The Integration of Telecommunication Measurement Devices Within The Framework Of An Instrumentation Grid

The LABNET-Server Software Architecture For Remote Management Of Distributed Laboratories: Current Status And Perspectives

Interconnection of Laboratory Equipment via Satellite and Space Links: Investigating the Performance of Software Platforms for the Management of Measurement Instrumentation