Dr. Carlos A. Jara

Santiago Puente

Real-time collaboration of virtual laboratories through the Internet

31 January 2009 in Computers & Education

Journal Article

A Network of Automatic Control Web-Based Laboratories

Sebastian Dormido

Francisco Esquembre

Oscar Reinoso

3 December 2010 in IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies

Journal Article

H. Vargas

José Sánchez-Moreno

A Survey on FPGA-Based Sensor Systems: Towards Intelligent and Reconfigurable Low-Power Sensors for Computer Vision, Control and Signal Processing

J. Snchez

This article presents an innovative project in the context of remote experimentation applied to control engineering education. Specifically, the authors describe their experience regarding the analysis, design, development, and exploitation of web-based technologies within the scope of automatic control. This work is part of an inter-university project known as AutomatL@bs, in which seven Spanish universities joined efforts to share their experimentation resources across the Internet. The paper begins by providing a background of how the development of virtual and remote control labs with pedagogical perspectives should be addressed. In particular, we present examples of remote labs developed by two of the university groups taking part in AutomatL@bs. We then present the automatic booking system that manages the access of users to each laboratory's didactical setup. Next, we show the integration process of every component into a Learning Management System (LMS). Finally, an overall system assessment of the students' perception of the quality of the experimental environment as a learning tool is analyzed.

31 March 2014 in Sensors

Journal Article

The current trend in the evolution of sensor systems seeks ways to provide more accuracy and resolution, while at the same time decreasing the size and power consumption. The use of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) provides specific reprogrammable hardware technology that can be properly exploited to obtain a reconfigurable sensor system. This adaptation capability enables the implementation of complex applications using the partial reconfigurability at a very low-power consumption. For highly demanding tasks FPGAs have been favored due to the high efficiency provided by their architectural flexibility (parallelism, on-chip memory, etc.), reconfigurability and superb performance in the development of algorithms. FPGAs have improved the performance of sensor systems and have triggered a clear increase in their use in new fields of application. A new generation of smarter, reconfigurable and lower power consumption sensors is being developed in Spain based on FPGAs. In this paper, a review of these developments is presented, describing as well the FPGA technologies employed by the different research groups and providing an overview of future research within this field.

4 June 2013 in IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies

Journal Article

Providing collaborative support to virtual and remote laboratories

Control Framework for Dexterous Manipulation Using Dynamic Visual Servoing and Tactile Sensors’ Feedback

Virtual and remote laboratories (VRLs) are e-learning resources that enhance the accessibility of experimental setups providing a distance teaching framework which meets the student's hands-on learning needs. In addition, online collaborative communication represents a practical and a constructivist method to transmit the knowledge and experience from the teacher to students, overcoming physical distance and isolation. This paper describes the extension of two open source tools: (1) the learning management system Moodle, and (2) the tool to create VRLs Easy Java Simulations (EJS). Our extension provides: (1) synchronous collaborative support to any VRL developed with EJS (i.e., any existing VRL written in EJS can be automatically converted into a collaborative lab with no cost), and (2) support to deploy synchronous collaborative VRLs into Moodle. Using our approach students and/or teachers can invite other users enrolled in a Moodle course to a real-time collaborative experimental session, sharing and/or supervising experiences at the same time they practice and explore experiments using VRLs.

21 January 2014 in Sensors

Journal Article

Jorge Pomares