Integrated virtual and remote lab for greenhouse climate control J. L. Rivas*, J. L. Guzmán*, F. Rodríguez*, M. Berenguel*, S. Dormido** *Dpto. Lenguajes y Computación. Universidad de Almería. The Agrifood Campus of International Excellence (ceiA3, Spain) Ctra. Sacramento s/n, Almería 04120 Email: [jlrivas, joguzman, frrodrig, beren]@ual.es **Dpto. Informática y Automática. UNED C/. Juan del Rosal 19, Madrid 28040 Email: sdormido@dia.uned.es Abstract: This work presents the development of an integrated virtual and remote lab for teaching greenhouse climate control and its inclusion in a collaborative platform. The virtual lab is based on a greenhouse nonlinear model, which is used by students to understand modeling and control issues learned in theoretical lessons. The remote lab is connected to a greenhouse scale model where it is possible to perform typical climatic control tests. Both, virtual and remote labs, are integrated as one software application in a collaborative environment that is available on Internet, allowing the tool be accessed at anytime without space-temporal constraints and offering an educational platform where students can work in the same way as they would be in a traditional laboratory.1 Keywords: control education, remote laboratory, virtual laboratory, greenhouse climate control. 1 This works This work has been partially funded by the following projects: DPI2007-61068, DPI2010-21589-C05-04 and DPI2011-27818-C02-01 (financed by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and ERDF funds). 1. INTRODUCTION The great development of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) has allowed to renew and to evolve traditional study techniques and teaching methods by adding new educational tools, as for instance, forums, social network for education, interactive tools, virtual labs, etc. These tools allow educators to adapt to the new technological era and, at the same time, to enhance the students’ motivation. This technological evolution has been also presented in many others fields, as the agro-alimentary field or agriculture, where new advances in automation and control engineering have been included to face the increasingly demanding conditions of the sector (Rodríguez et al., 2006). Followings these ideas, since some years ago, greenhouse automation is being included as a subject in many agricultural engineering curricula, and some software applications have been developed to help agronomy students and researchers to understand, implement, and use the new technological advances in the sector. Agricultural engineering is one of the most important degrees of the University of Almería (Spain), and for that reason, a great effort has been performed during the last years to develop new courses and new tools focused on these ideas. A web-based remote lab for teaching greenhouse climate control techniques was created at (Guzmán et al., 2005a). Afterwards, a virtual course on modern automation of agricultural systems was presented in (Rodríguez et al., 2004), and a virtual lab developed in (Guzman et al., 2005b). These three tools are being used successfully in a combined manner for teaching and learning issues related to greenhouse climatic control in undergraduate and doctorate courses. However, according to the students’ feedback and the teachers’ experience, they present a global drawback regarding to usability. The problem is that these three tools were developed in different platforms and the graphical user interfaces (GUI), the interactive capabilities, and the accessibility are quite different. Furthermore, the connection between the tools is quite tedious from an education point of view. Therefore, there is a need to integrate all these tools in a unique platform in such a way that the main graphical options are sharing by the virtual and remote labs, and the tools are combined facilitating information exchange. Hence, this paper presents the development of an integrated virtual and remote lab, which has been mainly developed using Easy Java Simulation (EJS) (Esquembre, 2004). Then, the resulting lab is integrated in a collaborative environment, called eMersion (Gillet et al., 2005), and included in a national Spanish network of virtual and remote labs, AutomatL@bs (AutomatL@bs, 2009). There are some other successful examples, in the control engineering field, that have developed following this same idea and that can be visited at AutomatL@bs (2009). Proceedings of the 9th IFAC Symposium Advances in Control Education The International Federation of Automatic Control Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, June 19-21, 2012 978-3-902823-01-4/12/$20.00 © 2012 IFAC 264 10.3182/20120619-3-RU-2024.00025