Abstract:

Going to an educational institution and dedicating yourself to it for some time in a specific place, following rules of conduct is part of everyday life, but carrying out practical activities during the COVID-19 pandemic is increasingly difficult. This difficulty is more significant for students in mechatronic engineering (automation and control) who need machines and equipment to perform tasks in their learning. However, with technological advances and the mass use of the internet, educational institutions are finding new teaching and learning mechanisms to deal with this new reality.

With this problem in mind, designing a system to help the student perform practical activities using remote access laboratories (RAL) was possible. RALs are tools that allow students to remotely use machines and equipment from educational institutions located anywhere in the world with internet access. It is a way to increase the use of these assets in the pandemic period and when there is no local use. For this access to occur, a system is needed that registers, manages, and connects students to the RALs' experiments. This system was designed based on the information from sensors and actuators in an industrial plant manufacturing process, data acquisition through digital twin technology, and technological advances in communication protocols.

The focus of this work is to present a system capable of collecting students' data behavior from a didactic plant. It starts from previous registration, allowing the students to perform their practice, according to the instructor's operation indications, in addition to providing help from an automatic self-correction system at the moment of the performed practical activity. This system was divided into three parts. The first part is called lab learning, the second is innovative learning, and the third is the management platform. Lab learning is the area of the platform capable of learning the operation of the practical activity. This learning occurs through digital twin technology that monitors the process and the virtualization of the didactic task. This virtualization will allow the intelligent learning module to identify the student's errors automatically, in addition to showing the essential characteristics of the process, such as a sensor or actuator triggering time, machine production time, and its operation in real-time, and the correct way to perform the practical activity. The management platform is responsible for monitoring the students, their respective successes and mistakes, and indicating new actions to improve their learning. Additionally, the platform registers and informs the registered labs available for use at that moment. The operation of this system will be tested with an example programming activity in the MPS (Modular Production System) didactic production line, where a product is inserted at the beginning of a conveyor and goes through an assembly process along the way.

Keywords:

Engineering Remote Laboratory, Teaching Mechatronics, Distance Learning, Smart Teaching Platform.