Virtual laboratories for education in science, technology, and engineering: A review

Within education, concepts such as distance learning, and open universities, are now becoming more widely used for teaching and learning. However, due to the nature of the subject domain, the teaching of Science, Technology, and Engineering are still relatively behind when using new technological approaches (particularly for online distance learning). The reason for this discrepancy lies in the fact that these fields often require laboratory exercises to provide effective skill acquisition and hands-on experience. Often it is difficult to make these laboratories accessible for online access. Either the real lab needs to be enabled for remote access or it needs to be replicated as a fully software-based virtual lab. We argue for the latter concept since it offers some advantages over remotely controlled real labs, which will be elaborated further in this paper. We are now seeing new emerging technologies that can overcome some of the potential difficulties in this area. These include: computer graphics, augmented reality, computational dynamics, and virtual worlds. This paper summarizes the state of the art in virtual laboratories and virtual worlds in the fields of science, technology, and engineering. The main research activity in these fields is discussed but special emphasis is put on the field of robotics due to the maturity of this area within the virtual-education community. This is not a coincidence; starting from its widely multidisciplinary character, robotics is a perfect example where all the other fields of engineering and physics can contribute. Thus, the use of virtual labs for other scientific and non-robotic engineering uses can be seen to share many of the same learning processes. This can include supporting the introduction of new concepts as part of learning about science and technology, and introducing more general engineering knowledge, through to supporting more constructive (and collaborative) education and training activities in a more complex engineering topic such as robotics. The objective of this paper is to outline this problem space in more detail and to create a valuable source of information that can help to define the starting position for future research

PERSEPSI MAHASISWA TERHADAP PENGGUNAAN SISTEM REMOTE LAB UNTUK PRAKTIKUM OTOMASI INDUSTRI

Remote lab merupakan teknologi yang memungkinkan mahasiswa untuk melakukan praktikum secara jarak jauh dengan menggunakan internet. Keterbatasan waktu dan tempat dari laboratorium tradisional dapat diatasi menggunakan sistem remote lab. Website (berbasis Moodle) dan remote desktop digunakan untuk mengendalikan alat praktikum yang ada di dalam laboratorium. Sistem remote lab memiliki sistem booking yang dapat dipilih oleh mahasiswa. Model penerimaan teknologi (Technology Acceptance Model) diadaptasi untuk mengetahui persepsi mahasiswa tentang penggunaan sistem remote lab pada praktikum otomasi industri. Hasil wawancara menunjukan bahwa sistem remote lab dapat mengatasi keterbatasan waktu dan tempat dari laboratorium tradisional. Lebih jauh lagi, sistem remote lab berpotensi besar untuk digunakan pada kegiatan praktiukum.-----Remote lab is a technology that allows students to do practicum remotely using the internet.The limited time and place of the hands-on laboratory can be overcome using the remote lab system. Websites (Moodle based) and remote desktops are used to control the plant inside the laboratory. The remote lab system has a booking system that students can choose from. Laptops and computers can be used to control and see the performance of the plant inside the lab. The remote lab system has been assigned to a group of students. The technology acceptance model is adapted to find out the students' perceptions of the use of remote lab systems in industrial automation practice. The results of interview indicate that the remote lab system can overcome the limitations of time and place from the laboratory. Furthermore, the remote lab system is potentially large for use in the practicum process

Design and Implementation of Remote Mechatronics Laboratory for e-Learning Using LabVIEW and Smartphone and Cross-platform Communication Toolkit (SCCT)

AbstractThis paper reports a work-in progress at the SOLVE, Students Online Laboratory Through Virtual Instrumentation, at the National Institute of Technology, Surathkal, Karnataka on the design and implementation of a remote lab utilizing emerging technologies.The paper focuses on the basic implementation of a remote laboratory using the publisher-subscriber architecture. Control system and Vibration experiments were chosen for practical implementation which could be monitored and controlled by students using internet. This enabled the remote users to gain a better understanding of the concept of vibrations and control system by performing the real experiment at a time and place of their choice. Both publisher and subscriber were developed using LabVIEW and SCCT add-on for communication. SCCT provides high performance data communication on conventional platforms like LabVIEW, Android, HMTL5, Java, JavaScript, thereby making it multiplatform approach. The method followed for data acquisition by the experimental server, architecture followed at the publisher and subscriber end, brief description about the performable experiments is explained in the present paper

Mobile laboratories as an alternative to conventional remote laboratories

Remote laboratories have been playing an important role on the improvement of flexibility and the extent of practical activities in teaching and learning activities in engineering and technology. However, the current remote laboratories model does not consider dynamic scenarios including collaboration, peer-to-peer labs and mobile labs. This paper presents a set of tools for creating collaborative online mobile laboratories that allow students to develop their own labs and share them with classmates and teachers. The approach used is compatible with the machine and network configurations that the target user has in schools and at home, and provides the retrieval of information for learning evaluation.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Nonlinear Control of Underactuated Systems using a 3-D Virtual Laboratory

Control of underactuated mechanical systems is currently one of the most active fields in research due to the diverse applications of these systems in real-life. The aim of this article is focused on the application of nonlinear control techniques for underactuated systems and the virtual simulation of their dynamics behavior. The main contribution of this research is related with the applications of balancing controllers designed with linearization techniques, and including swing-up control using energy based methods for two of the most typical underactuated systems used for testing nonlinear control: The cart-pole and the rotating pendulum systems. The second contribution relies in the development of a virtual laboratory for testing this algorithms and also with a great feature included; the platform is not tied to specific embedded controllers, the users can proof their own control techniques, adding control equations using a graphical user interface developed for that purpose. Finally, the analytical results will be validated via numerical solutions implemented on Matlab-Simulink toolbox, comparing the controllers and the simulation capabilities through several test cases