Professional Documents
Culture Documents
1 INTRODUCTION
2.3 Review
Below is an account of some of the existing online control engineering laboratories that are relevant to this
study. [16] developed an online DC motor position control experiments. The experiment involves two primary
elements: a server and a client PC communicating with
each other. A server consists of a low-cost microcontroller, Parallaxs 40-pin Basic Stamp 2 (BS2P40), interfaced
with an embedded Ethernet IC, Cirrus Logics Crystal
CS8900A, and the client computer sends/receives com
mand data to/from the microcontroller using User Da K.S. Alli, Ph.D Student at the Department of Electronic and Electrical
tagram Protocol (UDP) packets. The client PC estabEngineering, ObafemiAwolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria.
lished connection to the server using Java applets that
A.M. Jubril is with the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineer- allow the user to send command position of the motor
ing, ObafemiAwolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria.
via a client interface. At the University of Western Australia (UWA), a telerobot laboratory has been deployed
OlawaleAkinwale is with the Department of Electronic and Electrical En- using an ABB robot. This laboratory enables students to
gineering, ObafemiAwolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria.
perform kinematics experiment [24]. The users were required to download and install a client application be-
tive contributions. An online laboratory has been deployed at the School of Engineering, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) by [22]. The laboratory is
called the eMersion Remote laboratory or the eMersion
project. Experiments deployed in this laboratory in the
field of automatic control include an inverted pendulum
experiment and a servo drive experiment. The third experiment deployed is a thermal process training experiment. The eMersion project calls the client application
used for its experiments the Cockpit. The Cockpit comprises an experimentation component, a java applet
which serves as the experiment engine, a SysQuake remote component php applications which students send
theirexperiment specifications and receiveexperiment
results, and an eJournal which is an electronic version of
the traditional laboratory journal or laboratory notebook[7] developed an Automatic Control Telelab
(ACT) was developed at the University of Siena. In this
laboratory, the laboratory users were required to design
a PID controller for the experiment they wish to perform. The design is done using MathWorkss Simulink.
The user uploads his designed controller to the laboratory before performing the experiment.This remote laboratory experiment allowed the students with the opportunity of performing experiments with laboratory apparatus which are not readily available in such students
reachable environment and to relate in practice some
theoretical knowledge of control theory gain in the classroom in an easy way and without restrictions due to
laboratory opening time and processes availability. At
Faculty of Engineering, Albaha University, KSA, [9] developed Metrology educators to the use and adoption of
Java-applets in order to create virtual, online Metrology
laboratories for students. These methods have been used
to form a laboratory course which augments the more
conventional lectures in concepts of Metrology course.
Improvements of the package are still were incorporated
to Web-based technologies (Internet home page, HTML,
Java programming etc). This Web-based education and
training has been tested in classroom within an undergraduate preliminary year engineering course and students reported a positive experience with its use. At
Baskent University, Ankara, Turkey, [8] have conducted
a study for analyzing the performances of the computer
engineering students on the Lab Sessions of Computer
Network Course, in both theoretical and practical modes. The weekly scores gathered from the lab sessions
throughout the academic semesters of 2007-2008, 20082009 and 2009-2010 by usingOne-way and Two-way
Anova and Chi-Square tests were analyzed. However,
students opinion about the course and lab sessions were
analyzed by questionnaires at the end of each semester
during 3 years. [6] have developed a web-based laboratory for control engineering at the University of Bologna.
This involves implementation of a rotary flexible joint, a
ball and beam, a flexible link and a Furuta pendulum. In
the remote laboratory, a service broker authenticates the
user and thus, granting a user access to the laboratory,
designed SIMULINK controller model, MATLAB workspace variables file (MAT-file) andMATLAB m-function
3.1 Methodology
The DC Motor control experiments platform was set up
which consists of Quanser DC Motor mounted on the
National Instruments Educational Laboratory Virtual
Instruments (NI ELVIS II) unit which has an inbuilt Data
Acquisition Device and connected to power supply. This
experiment platform was connected to the PC with LabVIEW Runtime via a USB cable. In this research, the
developed control experiments involved the implementation of virtual instruments to produce digital controllers with Graphical User Interface using LabVIEW software. Three experiments were designed which involved
the implementation of virtual instruments to produce a
digitally control client interface. NI-ELVIS II suite software was installed on the PC running LabVIEW software which allows user to take commands and monitor
the DC motor control system performance by varyingdifferent control parameters. This experiment platform
+1
+1
+1
, (s)=
1
(2)
S 2 +2 + 2 (3)
=
=
1+2
(4)
(5)
(6)
+1
is used. Parameter
10
4.1 Results
A. User Experience.
The users allotted reservation times for each experiments
is between 10 and 30 minutes. The maximum time that a
student was permitted to reserve was 30 minutes for
each experiment. The students were asked to answer
questionnaires, and relate their responses to log file
records. About 120 students responded to the questionnaire, 80% of the students used the system while20% of
the students managed to operate the remote lab for more
than 10 minutes.The assessments presented here are
based on feedback from the twenty-five students who
successfully performed the experiments.
Laboratory effectiveness: The average score given by
the users for the effectiveness of the laboratory (i.e. the
experiment clients and the available documentation) was
70%.
Level of understanding: From the questions asked the
students sequel to their performing the experiments, the
average assessment of the depth of their understanding
of the concepts being taught, introduced and experimented in the laboratory was seventy-five percent.
Users Rating of the Laboratory: The average user rating was 70%.
Some of the faculty members who were involved in the
development of the online servomechanism control experiments have contributed in discussions with the faculty members who are responsible for supervising the
instruction of the core control systems at undergraduate
courses. The concerns expressed about the student interest and depth of understanding in the online servomechanism control experiments were almost identical to
the concerns raised about the undergraduate control
courses prior to the introduction of the servo control
based lab courses. The overall students performance
results in EEE407 which involved both theory and the
online practical sessions show that out of 120 students,
40% had Excellent, 35% had Good, 20% hadAverage, 4%
had Poor and 1% had Very Poor. Also, in addition to the
efforts made by the faculty members to contribute to the
students learning process, they also organized several
LabVIEW trainings for the students so as to familiarize
the students with LabVIEW based projects.
B. Users complaints
A number of users complained about not having the
correct full specified time to schedule, while they could
not launch the lab client interface. It was discovered that
differences in the times between the individual computers and the Laboratory-Side Scheduling Server were
causing these disparities. To resolve this, the documentation was updated to inform users to synchronize their
times with the Internet Time, for example, from
time.windows.com. This was resolved when they
changed the time zone setting of their computer to that
for Nigeria (GMT +1). The documentation for the laboratory was accordingly updated to specify that users check
the time zone settings of their computer to ensure that
they have the right time zone selected.Another problem
which surfaced on the need for the LabVIEW Runtime
was the fact that it was practically impossible to perform
the experiments from a cybercafe as one would have to
have the Runtime installed on the computer there. No
cybercafe around was eager to have some extra software installed on their computers - extra software to
further clog their registries and reduce computer speeds
bearing in mind that they mostly use minimum spec
computers. Hence, as long as LabVIEW clients were to
be used, it was decided that students performing the
experiments would have to use computers over which
they have some amount of control or dedicated computers provided by their faculty or departments.
5.Conclusion
An online laboratory has been set up at the ObafemiAwolowo
University,
available
at
http://ilab.oauife.edu.ng/sb. The position control experiment introduces newbies to the workings of a servo
control system. The effect of PID controller to reduce the
overshoot, steady-state error and settlingtime were investigated. The speed control experiment allows students to observe the effect of PI controller to reduce
steadystate error on the speed of DC motor. The system
modeling experiment is a medium whereby users specified some set of system parameters to some test input to
model the DC motor. Hence, work lies ahead on ways of
minimizing the laboratorys bandwidth requirements
while still presenting the necessary visual, auditory and
possibly haptic feedback to the user [4] and minimizing
simulations which could give students the feel of being
in a virtual laboratory instead of an online laboratory.
Experience gained from the setting up of this laboratory
showed that the overall development time to deploy a
new laboratory could be drastically reduced if LabVIEW
is used for the development of the experiment engines
and the clients. One reason for this is that one does not
need to develop separate applications for the client application and the experiment engine. Also, in creating a
LabVIEW application, one automatically creates a GUI
for it hence; there is no need for creation of a GUI for the
client application. The laboratory design was made to be
robust so that it is safe for use without human supervision.
11
6. References.
[1] B.O. Akinwale, (2010)Development of Robust Ilab Platform
for conducting Robotic arm experiments. M.Sc. ObafemiAwolowoUniversity, Ile-Ife, Nigeria.
[2]K. P. Ayodele, L.O.Kehinde, O. Jonah, O. Ilori, E.O.B.
Ajayi,O.O.Osasona. June, (2008) Development of an Operational Amplifier Virtual Laboratory Based On i-Lab Architecture and NIElvis. Proceedings of the ASEE Annual Conference
and Exposition,Pittsburgh.
[3]H. Basher, S.Isa, (2006) On-campus and Online Virtual Laboratory Experiments with LabVIEW, Proceedings of the IEEE SoutheastConference, Mamhis, Tennessee, U.S.A, Pg. 325-330.
[4] B. T. Bethea, A. M. Okamura, M. Kitagawa, and T. P. Fitton, S.
M. Cattaneo, and V.L. Gott, W.A.Baumgartner, D.D. Yuh,
(2004) Application of Haptic Feedback to Robotic Surgery.
Journal of Laparoendoscpic& Advanced Techniques
[5]A.Bohne, N.Faltin, B. Wagner, (2002).Self-directed Learning
and Tutorial Assistance in a Remote Laboratory. Interactive
ComputerAided Learning (ICL) International Workshop 2002. Vil
lach, Austria.
[6] C. Bonivento, L.Gentili, L. Marconi, L. Rappini,(2002). A WebBased Laboratory for Control Engineering Education. Second
International Workshop on Tele-Education in Engineering Using Vir
tual Laboratories. Sherbrooke, Canada.
[7] M.Casini, D.Prattichizzo,A. Vicino, (2004). The Automatic Control Telelab: A Remote Control Engineering Laboratory. Proceedingsof the 40th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, Orlando, Florida.vol 24, 36-44.
[8] B.G. Emiroglu, S.Sahin,(2013).Analysis of Students Performances during Lab Sessions of Computer Networks Course.
EducationalTechnology & Society, 16 (3), 329346
[9] A.Fahad, (2004). Web-Based Learning and Training for Virtual
Metrology Lab.Computer Science Department, Faculty of Engineering, Albaha University, 65451 Albaha, KSA, JOURNAL OF
TELECOMMUNICATIONS,VOLUME 1, ISSUE 2, MARCH
2010.
[10] Ghazaly, M. B. Application of Virtual Instrumentation in Postions Control System using Direct Digital Control via PID and
Fuzzy Logic Controller. UniversitiTeknologi Malaysia 2005.
[11]V.Harward, J. Del Alamo, V.Choudhary, K. Delong, J. Hardison,S. Lerman, J. Northridge, D. Talavera, C. Varadharajan,
S.Wang,K.Yehia, D.Zych, (2004) iLab: A Scalable Architecture
for Sharing Online Experiments.International Conference on Engineering Education, ICEE.Gainseville,Florida.
[12]V. Harward, J. Del Alamo, V. Choudhary, K. Delong, J. Hardison, S. Lerman, J. Northridge,D. Talavera, C. Varadharajan, S.
Wang, K.Yehia, D.Zych,(2009) iLab: A Scalable Architecture
for Sharing Online Experiments.International Conference on