Virtual and Remote Laboratory Framework Development for Engineering Technology Education—A Case Study

Virtual and Remote Laboratory (VR-Lab) is an inevitable necessity for Internet enabled education in Engineering Technology and other STEM fields due to the effectiveness, flexibility and cost-saving. The VR-Lab research at Texas Southern University (TSU) is to develop a software and hardware framework that allows users to simulate the experiments virtually and control physical instruments remotely via the Internet with minimal to zero-installation beyond a typical web browser. Currently, multiple web based experiments for Data Communication, DC circuit, Active Vibration Control and Digital Signal Processing (DSP) subjects are available for experimentation and coursework integration. To allow rapid development, National Instruments (NI) software and hardware is used for the programming, data acquisition, and interaction with remote devices. The programming of virtual experiments is primarily done with NI LabVIEW v8.6 as well as Java. To reduce or eliminate the need for browser plug-ins or third party software in order to operate, the VR-Lab framework uses Web 2.0 technology. The goal of the VR-Lab framework is to provide cross-browser and client-side plug-in free experiment environment for engineering and technology education. A remote Smart Vibration Platform experiment which is good for teaching active vibration control is used to demonstrate how to integrate a remote experiment into the VR-Lab framework.