Remote Laboratory as a novel tool for control engineering studies: a feedback study Amélie Chevalier 1 , Cosmin Copot 1 , Andra Hegedus 2 and Robin De Keyser 1 1 Ghent University, Belgium, 2 Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania Abstract Remote Laboratories use Internet to connect remotely to real-life plants to teach theoretical concepts to students [1]. Experience dictates that engineering students are more motivated to learn these new concepts when they have the opportunity of doing real- life experiments where projects and team work play an important role [2]. However, in present times of limited time and financial resources at the universities, providing practical experiments for the booming amount of students is challenging. A Remote Laboratory for control engineering students with two distinct applications is developed: a Ball and Plate system and a Quadruple Water Tank system (Figure 1). The combination of both applications allows us to provide examples from all areas of interest. The main difference between the presented Remote Lab and previous labs is the possibility to give to a diverse group of students a wide range of control applications. The novelty of our Remote Lab is the high flexibility in terms of control strategies. 1) Ball and Plate: The goal of the Ball and Plate system is to control the position of a ball on the plate by controlling the voltages sent to the servo motors. Basic controllers, such as Proportional-Integral-Differential (PID) controllers, as well as more advanced controllers are implemented for this system. The students can design a suitable controller for the system and implement this designed controller to the system. 2) Quadruple Water Tank system: The Quadruple Water Tank system is a Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO) system. Control of MIMO systems is a subject of the master course on control. The developed application of the Quadruple Water Tanks presents to the students a challenging problem where coupling between inputs and outputs is important. The students can apply the theoretical concepts of relative gain array (RGA) and decoupling control to this challenging system. In the Remote Lab application, the students can perform two tasks: identification and control design. To be able to evaluate the developed Remote Lab as an educational tool, two types of exercises (bachelor and master level) have been developed and presented to a bench of 20 master students. After performing both exercises, evaluation of the Remote Lab is obtained via a survey which uses a 5 point Likert-type scale (1 = very dissatisfied, 2 = dissatisfied, 3 = neutral, 4 = satisfied and 5 = very satisfied). The 23 questions in the survey were divided into four main sections: Interest for remote control of devices, Prerequirements and technical documentation, Application performance and GUI interactivity and Quality of education. The results show that there is a general interest for remote control of devices using a Remote Lab but also that we still have the possibility to improve the performance of the application and the technical documentation. The Remote Lab can be a useful tool in the education of control engineers as it gives the opportunity for practical experiments in an university environment where time and financial resources for practical applications become scarce. A first survey showed that there is a big interest for these remote applications amongst the students and they accept it as a viable teaching tool in control engineering. This first evaluation of the developed Remote Lab, gives reason to extend it in the future. Future work includes the development of an automatic scheduling in order to give each student a time slot as the system only works with one user at the time. Fig. 1 Ball and Plate system (left), Quadruple Water tanks (right) References [1] A. Barrios, S. Panche, M. Duque, V. Grisales, F. Prieto, J. Villa, P. Chevrel and M. Canu, “A multiuser remote academic laboratory system”, Computers & Education, vol 62, pp. 111-122, 2013. [2] C. Ionescu, E. Fabragas, S. Cristescu, S. Dormido and R. De Keyser, “A remote laboratory as an innovative educational tool for practicing control engineering concepts”, IEEE Trans. Educ., pp. 436-442, 2013. 14 th International Conference on Optimization of Electrical and Electronic Equipment OPTIM 2014 May 22-24, 2014, Brasov, Romania 152