State-of-the-art remote laboratories for industrial electronics applications

Abstract

There is no doubt that the implementation of practical sessions in engineering education paves the way for students to be familiar with the instruments and thus, with the industrial realworld. Moreover, they augment the learning outcomes by strengthening the understanding of scientific concepts and theories. Unfortunately, there exist a wide gap between the engineering educational curricula and the industrial real-world owing to the lack of experimentation availability. This is due to high cost and administration burdens that have hindered the adoption of practical sessions causing a significant decline in experimentation within engineering education. Recently, with the advent and exploitation of computer and communication technologies, remote laboratories have broadly proliferated among many universities. Remote laboratories provide on-line ubiquitous workbenches unconstrained by neither temporal nor geographical considerations and allow an interactive learning environment that maintains student attention. In this context, hundreds of remote laboratories for industrial electronics applications have been developed and numerous technologies have emerged in order to facilitate their construction and implementation. This paper reports on state-of-art remote laboratories for industrial electronics applications. and their design stages. The paper addresses many solutions in the development and the design stages, along with cutting edge technologies involved. This is in order to foster remote laboratories adoption within industrial electronics disciplines and hence, increase the industrial competencies in engineering education.

Public Access Architecture Design of an FPGA-Hardware-Based Nervous System Emulation Remote Lab

“…The analysis done in [5] concludes that most industrial electronics remote laboratories share a common architecture design. The main components of the conceptual architecture shared among many remote laboratories are: User interface, Web-server, Lab server, Instruments, Controller and Controlled Objects.…”

“…Two reference papers analyse and report on the state of art of remote laboratories [3,4]. The research work in [5] takes these two reference papers, and provides an analysis from a design and development point of view for industrial electronics applications. The Si elegans project belongs to the industrial electronics remote laboratory category, considering that the core of the experiment is emulated in an FPGA network.…”

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“…This section is a review of the common architectures of remote experiments frequently applied so far, focusing on their basic elements [2]. These elements are the user interface, the web server, the lab server and the controllers.…”

Laboratory as a Service (LaaS): A model for developing and implementing remote laboratories as modular components

“…Some applications might require a controller-in addition to the laboratory serverfor a specific task. Commonly used controllers are either microcontrollers or Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) [18,19].…”