LABEXP - Laboratório de experimentação remota em tempo real

Abstract

This work proposes the Real Time Remote Experimentation Laboratory’s (LabExp) development and implementation process. This laboratory is actually working in Universidade Federal do Pará aiming to act as an auxiliary tool for teaching and learning of control systems disciplines. Teaching and learning were included through experiments availability, where users may interact with them, changing parameters and observing this interaction results. Besides experiments availability, it is believed that in online learning environments it is interesting to make available for students tools that provide greater interaction between students and teachers and with the remote laboratory, providing a more collaborative approach to learning, encouraging the student. This way, it is available to students three applications: one to submit their own experiments, another for interaction with other students through a forum, and another to send your opinions/criticisms. Before LabExp’s development and implementation process, it was make a brief analysis about online education, because this is the laboratory’s purpose. This analysis provided more knowledge about this method of education, guiding the rest of LabExp’s development. It is understood that the technologies used are not critical for a remote laboratory’s development, directed to online education, however remote experiments of control systems have a temporal restriction, i.e. need to obey restrict time limits, working in real time. To achieve this behavior it was used the Real Time Application Interface (RTAI), with the RTAIXML component. Beyond used technologies, this work also presents LabExp’s modeling process, according to Unified Modeling Language (UML) standard, principles and resources, applied to web applications. This modeling process was of fundamental importance, because it facilitated and guided the laboratory’s development.