Luciano Antonio Mendes

WebLab of a DC motor speed control didactical experiment

Purpose – Weblabs are an additional resource in the execution of experiments in control engineering education, making learning process more flexible both in time, by allowing extra class laboratory activities, and space, bringing the learning experience to remote locations where experimentation facilities would not be available. The purpose of this paper is to investigate and report on a weblab project where the speed of a DC motor is controlled in closed loop, being the control system parameters set by the remote user (student).Design/methodology/approach – The engine control experiments are run and on‐line transmitted by videoconference over the internet, from a didactical plant physically located at the Systems and Automation Laboratory of the Control and Automation Engineering department of the Pontifical Catholic University of Parana. The system response (transient motor speed) to the users choice of parameters is evaluated through performance indices (IAE, ITAE), which are used to qualify the abili...

Experiment lab server architecture: A web services approach to supporting interactive LabVIEW-based remote experiments under MIT's iLab shared architecture

The MIT iLab Shared Architecture (ISA) is widely used to support remote experimentation, providing basic functionalities such as users management, scheduling, access control and results storage. This paper addresses the optimization of LabVIEW-based REs creation under ISA, with the standardization of common lab server functionalities and communications. The Experiment Lab Server Architecture (ELSA), created as an ISA extension, fulfills the requirements of an ISA process agent and uses web services to connect the client with the lab server. ELSA automatically manages the initial definition and runtime traffic of experiment-specific input/output parameters. Once the experiment and client codes are created, RE configuration, startup and operation can be easily accomplished. In a pilot implementation using ELSA, the web services mediation of data transfer performed at rates high enough for a smooth user interaction experience. ELSA web services approach allows for a loose coupling in RE design and can effectively shorten its development cycle.

Process Mining Applied to Player Interaction and Decision Taking Analysis in Educational Remote Games

The usage of Game-Based Learning in engineering education, especially games and simulations to foster students interest and motivation, has been gaining attention by researchers. The present study has as main objective to explore possibilities of application of Process Mining techniques in the analysis of interactions among players, and the involved decision taking processes, in non-digital games. The analysis was applied to board games and to interactive remote experiments enhanced with ludic elements (remote games, as long as the game structure keeps similarity with board games). Activity logs collected during both board and remote game sessions were analyzed through process mining techniques available in ProM 5.2 software. From results, positive hypothesis were established regarding the applicability of process mining in finding behavior patterns presented by students playing educational games.

Using cloud web services to intermediate communication in ISA / ELSA: Circumventing the firewall in single user and collaborative remote experimentation

Remote experimentation has long conflicted with security policies imposed by networks administrators. To provide external access to experiment servers in a university, security measures are demanded. Such leads to an excessive dependency on the IT departments for services configuration and maintenance. In the present work, modifications in ISA/ELSA architecture are proposed to circumvent those problems. By locating proxies in the cloud, the communication between user interface and laboratory experiment avoids the need for a laboratory server, which now acts like a polling client of the cloud web service. Configurations for single-user and cooperative remote experiments are discussed. In tests, requests processing time was less than 250ms, enough to support a great amount of remote experiments.