Development of control system experiments via the internet

Abstract

The Internet has been widely used by many educational institutions to present course materials to the learners using an application, namely E-learning. Currently, there are several virtual and remote laboratories on the web, mainly developed in university research labs. In this research, we want to develop a remote conducted control experiment via internet which in turn will enable users to run the simulation and access the physical system via the Internet. The users can run the remote simulation and experiments, download the data and graphic results and analyze them offline. Three plants, namely rotary flexible link, belt conveyor and rotary inverted pendulum, are used as the experiment platform. We name our application as E- laboratory. Developed using MATAB as its core environment, E-laboratory provides system analysis, identification and control design experiments. System analysis experiments will enable users to study the behavior of the plants and its predefined controller. System identification experiments offer an input-output pair of measurement that used in identification system. Control design experiments allow users to design their controller and apply it to the respective plants. As an example, those three types of experiments are applied to the flexible link plant.