Remote Lab: A Reliable Tele-Laboratory Environment

Experiments on real physical systems play a major role in engineering disciplines. Traditionally, the use of real physical systems requires a students' physical presence in the laboratory. We have developed the RemoteLab telelaboratory environment, which allows students to remotely conduct physical experiments via the Web, creating a reliable integrated virtual and real laboratory education environment. The main challenge in such a situation comes from the fact that students interact with non-fail-safe laboratory equipment without on-site human supervision. Our solution uses the online-replacement mechanisms in the previously developed Simplex system. Simplex is based on the concept of analytic redundancy and provides a “supervisor” for experimental, student-supplied controllers in form of an ultra-reliable safety controller, which eventually takes over control of the experiment. Within this paper, we describe a RemoteLab-experiment where a robot is controlled by a joystick via a CORBA event channel and the Simplex system. The actual experiment has been carried out in a distributed fashion between the authors’ universities. Within this context, the paper reports on the extension of the fault-tolerant real-time Simplex control system with open, CORBA-based interfaces.