Most publications on online laboratories assume that all institutions have similar scenarios. Unfortunately, this is far from the truth. Many developing countries and disadvantaged colleges have challenges that hinder successful deployment of remote laboratories, whereas these challenges may not be applicable in more developed environments. In this chapter, we highlight these challenges and propose solutions. In doing this, we will draw from our experiences, garnered while developing labs in selected challenged environments.
In this paper, the development of robotic arm experiments using the i-Lab Interactive Architecture is presented. Communication with the arm is done by using the RS-232 protocol. The robotic arm used in the laboratory has five degrees of freedom, each degree of freedom being controlled by a servomotor. The servomotors are controlled via pulse-width modulation (PWM), the width of each pulse being indicative of the position to which motor should move.Three experiments are considered. The first experiment simply makes the robotic arm available to the student for direct control by moving different sliders. Each slider controls a motor. This would be the preliminary task to students who are new to robotics, and would familiarise them with the workings of the robotic arm. The second experiment demonstrates the effect of gravity on a robotic arm at different data rates. The third experiment developed entails requiring students to program the positions of each of the motors for each sequence stage of robot movements. Students would draw up this movement to perform an instructordetermined task. The instructor would require the students to, for example, pick an object from one location and place the object in another location.The RA-01 robotic arm made by Images SI Inc. is used for these experiments and LabVIEW is used to create the laboratory clients and experiment engines. A visual feedback from the lab to the client is provided via a webcam. I.
Remote laboratories on mobile phones have been around for a few years now. This has greatly improved accessibility of these remote labs to students who cannot afford computers but have mobile phones. When money is a factor however (as is often the case with those who can’t afford a computer), the cost of use of these remote laboratories should be minimized. This work addressed this issue of minimizing the cost of use of the remote lab by making use of data compression for data sent between the user and remote lab.
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