1. State-of-the-Art Remote Laboratories
for Industrial Electronics
Applications
• Mohamed Tawfik
• Elio Sancristobal
• Sergio Martin
• Gabriel Díaz
• Manuel Castro
• Rosario Gil
Electrical & Computer Engineering Department
Spanish University for Distance Education (UNED)

2. The implementation of practical sessions in engineering education:
• Paves the way for students to be familiar with the instruments and thus,
with the industrial real-world.
• Augment the learning outcomes by strengthening the understanding of
scientific concepts and theories.

3. Unfortunately, there exist a wide gap between the engineering
educational curricula and the industrial real-world owing to:
• The lack of experimentation availability.
• The high cost of equipment and administration burdens.

4. • Remote laboratories addresses these needs providing on-line ubiquitous
workbenches unconstrained by neither temporal nor geographical
considerations.
• Recently, hundreds of remote laboratories for industrial electronics
applications have been developed at many universities.

5. • Despite this, the design of remote laboratories has not received too much
attention; most of the published literature focus only on the objectives of
a certain application, within a conducted course or on their functional and
operational aspects.
• To fill this gap, in this contribution we present a generic study on state-
of-art remote laboratories for industrial electronics applications and their
development addressing all the design process stages and cutting edge
technologies adopted.

6. Remote laboratories are those laboratories that can be controlled and
administrated online. They differ from the virtual simulated
laboratories as they are interacting with physical instruments.

7. e.g. Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality (VISIR)
VISIR is a remote laboratory for wiring and measurement of electronic
circuits remotely.

8. The common generic architecture design of today’s remote laboratory
for industrial electronics applications.

9. There exist two major challenges in building remote laboratories:
• Selecting the lab server software.
• Selecting the client-server communication technology.

10. The common outstanding technologies applied for remote laboratories
lab server software development are LabVIEW and MATLAB.

11. VS
Both possess rich and powerful features:
• Data exchange with other GUI applications such as COM, ActiveX, CGI, Java and .Net
applications, and web services.
• Support for standard Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) such as IVI, VISA,
PXI, GPIB, VXI, USB, LXI, and others.
• Connection with ODBC or OLEDB compliance database; compilation as DLL files to be
called from the Lab server software as a driver to execute the experiments on the
hardware.
• Support for OPC Servers to enable HMI and SCADA.

12. VS
• LabVIEW is the most popular remote laboratory environment and it is the most
outstanding representative of graphical programming language visualization and
parameter tuning for remote operation.
• MATLAB is the most powerful computing language for control algorithm
development and simulation
• Full using of their advantages can achieve high efficiency programming. In
numerous remote laboratories applications, a hybrid method was adopted; the
signal acquisition and the GUI were developed with LabVIEW, while numerical
calculation and signal processing were developed with MATLAB.

13. LabVIEW can support several ways of hybrid programming with MATLAB by means of:
• ActiveX automation technology
• DLL technology
• COM technology
• MathScript RT Module
Mathscript module allows
embedding .m file scripts in LabVIEW
applications by connecting the text-
based I/O variables with the inputs
and outputs of LabVIEW.

14. The client-server layer is responsible for the communication between
user interface and the lab server

15. • The client-server layer is responsible for the communication between
user interface and the lab server
User Interface Lab Server Software

16. There exist a wide variety of technologies for the communication
between client-server:
 Desktop Sharing security problems
• Virtual Network Computing (VNC)very slow
• Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) limited to a single connection
 Common Gateway Interface (CGI) performance problems
 ActiveX and Java Applets plugins required
 Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) plugins required
 LabVIEW Web server only with LabVIEW applications
 Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) the actual trend
Each of these solutions have its relative advantages and disadvantages,
which are well discussed in the paper. However, the trend is more shifted
towards web standards such as AJAX and Web services. On the mean time
for LabVIEW applications LabVIEW web interface is the common choice.

17. Research on Technologies for Engineering Education
http://ohm.ieec.uned.es/
For more information about remote laboratories, we invite you to access to
the web page of the Electrical & Computer Engineering department of the
UNED.

18. Thanks for your Attention!
Rosario Gil
Electrical & Computer Engineering Department (DIEEC)
Spanish University for Distance Education (UNED)