Educational aspects of mechatronic control course design for collaborative remote laboratory

This paper addresses educational aspects of a distance learning mechatronic control course, which is one of the 18 courses that compound an international collaborative remote laboratory designed for students of electrical engineering. The work is undertaken in the frame of European Leonardo da Vinci project EDIPE ldquoE-learning distance interactive practical educationrdquo with a goal to offer Web based experimental courses to the students from 11 countries that participate in the project. Course presented in this paper is motion control of mechatronic device with nonlinear dynamics. Addressed topics are modelling of dynamics of mechatronic device, design of linear and nonlinear motion controllers, implementation and optimization of motion controllers for real mechatronic system. Three remote experiments are available as a part of the course: motion control of mechatronic device with cascade controller, motion control with PD controller and computed torque motion controller. For the course two educational strategies are developed; one for geographically distant students and one for local students. For geographically distant students the course is executed completely remote. For local students some parts of remote course are combined with traditional learning in the classroom and laboratory sessions in order to improve coursepsilas flexibility and to achieve best educational outcome.