Nourdine Aliane

Limitations of Remote Laboratories in Control Engineering Education

Remote laboratories showed significant progress during last years. Their integration in engineering education had their justification in solving many logistic problems inherent to conventional labs. In control engineering education, shifting from hands-on experience to a remote experimentation modifies completely the learning environment, and the factors that could compromise the effectiveness of learning outcomes should be considered carefully. This short paper discusses a number of pedagogical limitations intrinsic to remote experimentation in control engineering education.

Teaching fundamentals of robotics to computer scientists

This article presents a methodology to reinforce the teaching of fundamentals of robotics to computer scientists. The pedagogical basis is focused on engaging students in an in‐depth study of the subject using computing in a substantive way. The approach consists in complementing the lectures by programming assignments focused on giving students a deeper understanding of how robotic systems work from the inside. This article presents the authors experience in the use of this approach, as well as a set of proposed assignment projects.

Traffic violation alert and management

The present paper presents an in-vehicle system for traffic violation alert and management. The system hardware consists of a combination of an on-board computer vision system for traffic sign detection and recognition with a data recorder device for traffic violation alert and management. At present, traffic violations are only focused on three signs: namely speed limit, stop sign, and forbidden turning. The system is designed to warn drivers about potential traffic violations by emitting acoustical messages through vehicle loudspeakers. These messages are issued with sufficient notice to provide the driver with enough time to react to the oncoming traffic situation. However, when a traffic violation is committed, the corresponding offence information such as vehicle speed, GPS location, and other driving parameters, are saved in a database for off-line analysis. In addition, an auxiliary application permits the registered traffic violations to be represented as a standard Google Earth map. The prototype was tested in a real scene under different lighting conditions and showed reasonable results.

Un Laboratorio de Ingeniería de Control Basado en Internet

This paper presents the development of an internet-based remote laboratory for control engineering teaching education developed at the Universidad Europea de Madrid. The system allows users to perform control experiments in open or closed loops, using predefined structure controllers that can be executed on the server side or in the client side. The main features of the remote system are concurrent access for up to four users, automatic report generation, and reusing templates of the experiments. Finally, the system architecture is detailed presenting and discussing its most important features.

A System for Traffic Violation Detection

This paper describes the framework and components of an experimental platform for an advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) aimed at providing drivers with a feedback about traffic violations they have committed during their driving. The system is able to detect some specific traffic violations, record data associated to these faults in a local data-base, and also allow visualization of the spatial and temporal information of these traffic violations in a geographical map using the standard Google Earth tool. The test-bed is mainly composed of two parts: a computer vision subsystem for traffic sign detection and recognition which operates during both day and nighttime, and an event data recorder (EDR) for recording data related to some specific traffic violations. The paper covers firstly the description of the hardware architecture and then presents the policies used for handling traffic violations.

Practical experiences on building structured remote and virtual laboratories from the student's point of view

Nowadays, the use of remote laboratories is a common feature in order to get students involved in practical experiences. This is particularly important in distance learning environment. The regular practice is to develop a particular laboratory, required by the student competences curricula. Usually, this involves a lack of methodology or a standard procedure so, new developments must be done to include new laboratories, additionally so many “manual” procedures are required. RELATED (REmote LABoratory Extended) its used to solve these issues. In this paper, a practical experience of the structured development process of a virtual laboratory, using RELATED framework, will be presented from the point of view of students. This virtual laboratory is a simple signal generator. This signal generator will be used to generate a reference position for the height of the ball of an electromagnetic levitation system in a control experiment. Finally, responses of surveys made by students will be presented, in order to get satisfaction results of using/development of virtual/remote laboratories using RELATED.

Structured remote laboratory development

The use of remote laboratories has become a common technique in universities to provide educational services related to engineering. However, the development efforts of these laboratories have not been contemplated in a structured way, with no specific methodologies that allow the reuse of such laboratories or parts thereof. This problem of structured and methodological development is associated with a number of disadvantages which imply that the development of new labs or their integration with other services is a complex task. This paper shows how this goal can be achieved using RELATED (REmote LAboratories exTendED). It is shown the development model proposed by this methodology, as well as the services provided by this development framework. The article shows an example of application of this methodology, using a magnetic levitation system, which is prepared for “on-site” experiences. From this laboratory, and following specific methodological steps, is shown as is possible to reuse developed code and provide a set of remote experiments for the magnetic levitation system.

Driver behavior monitoring system based on traffic violation

This paper describes the overall framework and components of an experimental platform for driver behavior monitoring based on drivers traffic violation records. This platform is composed of two separate subsystems: a driver assistance system based on road sign detection and recognition, and a traffic violation recording unit in which the vehicle is involved. The system provides drivers with their traffic violation records allowing them to visualize the spatial and temporal information of their traffic violation using the standard Google Earth tool. This feedback can be used to persuade drivers in changing their driving styles by instilling improved behavior. The paper covers firstly the description of the hardware architecture and then presents the developed functionalities.

Spreadsheet‐based interactive modules for control education

In the last few years, spreadsheets have become a popular computational tool and a powerful platform for performing engineering calculations. The simplicity of spreadsheet programming in addition to their plotting capabilities, and other provided utilities, make them a powerful didactic tool. This paper describes the development of interactive tools based on Excel spreadsheets for basic control education. The motivation for developing these tools was to give students special learning modules focused on transmitting the essence of dynamics of systems to achieve an accurate mental model as well as helping them understand how feedback works.

Detection and visualization of potential traffic hotspots in urban environments

In this paper we present a novel contribution work, describing a system that helps to detect urban areas with high density of incidents or risk situations. Our system has a perception and pre-collision system that feed an expert system aimed at detecting dangerous situations. All incidents gathered by the vehicles are sent to a global repository, and its data is processed for detecting urban hotspots where the density of incidents is very high. That information can be useful for city councils, allowing them to address these areas with a high concentration of risk situations.