Microcontroller-Based Robotics and SCADA Experiments

The recently rapid increase in research and development in automation technology has led to a gap between education and industry. Although developing countries need to keep in touch with the latest developments, that poses some difficulties for industrial automation education, such as cost, lack of student motivation, and insufficient laboratory infrastructure. Low-cost experimental setups may overcome many of these challenges. This paper describes how supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) and robotics experiments in control and automation education can be conducted at reasonable cost. These setups consist of a fluid tank, a Cartesian robot with a three-axis robot arm, and serial, parallel, USB, and TCP/IP communication ports. These experiments were developed and used in control and automation education in the Automation Laboratory of Ege Technical and Business College, Ege University, İzmir, Turkey. The presented experiments were also quantitatively evaluated using the one-way ANOVA test on the exam results, and qualitatively evaluated by a discussion session and survey. The results indicated that student performance improved when microcontroller-based experimental setups were used, and that increasing the complexity of experiments also helped improve students´ academic success.