A KNOWLEDGE BASED SYSTEM FOR REMOTE LABORATORY SUPERVSION: APPLICATION TO PID TUNING

In this article we propose to enhance the existing remote laboratory technology to incorporate lecturer expertise during remote laboratory operation. This is an important point because it allows to truly expand the capabilities of time accessibility that remote laboratories offers by providing lecturer supervision. The lecturer expertise is modelled by means of a set of rules which form a knowledge base. On the basis of practice development and experimental results the knowledge base is able to arise questions in order to i) help the student with the practical development, ii) link practical knowledge with theoretic based knowledge iii) point towards competence requirements to gained by the student.

This is applied to the tuning of Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) controllers on the automatic control subject. In this way the knowledge based system helps the student, on the basis of his/her requirements (i.e. current experimental results), to review necessary theoretical concepts needed to design a successful PID controller. We make use of the root locus design tool as a means to link experimental results with theoretic knowledge. A great deal of effort is performed on the knowledge based system structure in order to link, in a pedagogic way, experimental results with questions arisen to the student. The objective is to make the student think about the experiment results using the theoretical contents as the thinking frame, so the questions are neither too direct nor too ambiguous.

We believe that the approach nicely provides educational resources according to the framework proposed on the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) in which the student working system is shifted towards the student himself/herself. The existence of remote laboratories with knowledge based guidance increases the self learning student capabilities.