7 research outputs found
Efficient deployment of remote laboratories with TwinCAT-PLCs and EjsS Plugins
Get PDFThis paper describes a new approach to streamline the development of Remote Laboratories (RL) for Control Education based on TwinCAT Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) and Easy JavaScript Simulations (EJsS). On one hand, the TwinCAT PLC is used to implement the laboratory back-end (responsible of closing the feedback loop over the plant under study) with industrial real-time automation methodologies. On the other hand, EJsS is used: 1) to define the RL Human-Machine Interface (HMI) front-end (used by the students to parametrize & observe the evolution of the PLC behavior and signals) and 2) to smooth and centralize the majority of the tasks that the instructors have to perform to configure and deploy the RL. This second utility of EJsS, a novelty of the RL presented in this paper, is supported by an EJsS Plugin that has been especially designed with that purpose. Besides, it is worth noting that our new RL is supported by an improved version of ReNoLabs, developed in 2016 to be a lightweight middle-ware of RLs with EJsS HMI webpages and different types of backends, whose Node.js-based server has been updated to backup the functionality of the EJsS Plugin. This paper also shows how to use our approach to setup a RL and describes the main characteristics of two RLs that have been updated with it
Multi-Robot Systems: Challenges, Trends and Applications
Get PDFThis book is a printed edition of the Special Issue entitled “Multi-Robot Systems: Challenges, Trends, and Applications” that was published in Applied Sciences. This Special Issue collected seventeen high-quality papers that discuss the main challenges of multi-robot systems, present the trends to address these issues, and report various relevant applications. Some of the topics addressed by these papers are robot swarms, mission planning, robot teaming, machine learning, immersive technologies, search and rescue, and social robotics
