Development and Enhancement of RLab - A Remote Laboratory System

The premise for the development of a remote laboratory, or RLab, is to allow a user from any location to access and perform a variety of experiments on electromechanical systems. Included in the RLab educational approach is a Web-based virtual environment using LabVIEW that can be used to conduct testing of control methods applied to electromechanical machines, or physical plants. This remote laboratory, RLab, exposes a set of physical plants to worldwide use, with the only requirement at the client side being a computer and an Internet browser. This laboratory environment gives remote users the possibility to control a real world physical plant, observe its behavior, and download measured data of the machine system for further analysis. The first version of RLab is used to control three electromechanical systems. The system consists of seven servers: a login server, three experiment servers, a client server, a Webcam server, and a status monitor server. The system is upgraded to later releases of LabVIEW in order to exploit the built-in capabilities of LabVIEW and facilitate the introduction of new electromechanical plants. This paper describes the RLab environment and discusses the recent enhancements of the system.