Abstract:

Experiments lab occupies a very important place in the learning methodologies. In the engineering fields, the students pass a large part of their time in these labs. However, the achievement of the practical experiments requires in the most cases expensive equipment such as: measuring instruments, acquisition cards, computing stations, …etc. on the other hand, the considerable increase of the student number needs the duplication of experiment work stations. This contributed also to increase the experiments global cost. In this case the majority of educational institutions suffer in front of this logistical problem. Therefore, the remote labs give a practical solution to this problem. They allow sharing the same experiment lab to a larger number of students. Moreover, they give a remote access to hardware experiments without the necessity of people displacement. So, they lead to save the time and reduce inactivity days. Remote labs capitalize the large diffusion of the Internet over the world. Essentially, they exploit web-based platforms to give an interactive interface to the users. This interface interacts directly with the remote hardware.

In this work, an automatic control lab for robotics education is mounted and tested. The remote lab deals with physical experiments on undergraduate level for automatic control. The whole architecture of the remote lab is based on ISA architecture. The main objective of this work is to teach students the basic principles of modeling and control of the robot manipulators. The platform allows the client or the student to access through his account in order to: make reservation, launch the experiment and view experiment storage results. The student manipulates the experiment via a developed graphical user interface GUI based on LabVIEW environment. This GUI has two control modes for this robot manipulator; point-to-point control and trajectory control. During the experiment, the student can visualize in real time the robot's movement via an IP camera. Moreover, the GUI displays in real time the Cartesian coordinates of the end effector position and the joint angles corresponding to this position. the student can also enter the values of the desired points or trajectories on which he wants to control his robot. The GUI has been designed to help students to fully understand the control technique of arm robot as well as the interest of using the direct and the inverse kinematic model.

Keywords:

Remote Lab, Robot Arm, Automatic Control, online laboratories.