Design, Implementation, and Salient Features

45 0272-1708/04/$20.00©2004IEEE IEEE Control Systems Magazine T he World Wide Web has provided an opportunity for design and analysis of control systems through the Internet. An increasing number of Web-based software packages have been developed to enhance the teaching and design of control systems [1]. Today, one of the most popular applications in control systems is Web-based educational environments and laboratories. As an example, the interactive study support environment presented in [2] provides course management, online exercises, and laboratories. Based on VCLab [3], which contains Java applets and MATLAB plug-ins, the system allows students to enter MATLAB commands on the Web page and submit these commands to the MATLAB program for execution. The output generated by these commands can be displayed on the same Web page. To use this Web-based study environment, however, the MATLAB software has to be installed on the client machines. Instead of using MATLAB plug-ins to perform numerical computation on the client side, Java applets are sometimes used for numerical computation on the client side. For example, applications of Java applets can be found in the Web-based two-degrees-of-freedom robot manipulator simulation system [4] and the Virtual Control Lab [5]. Due to the lack of Design, implementation, and salient features