Developing Networked Control Labs: A Matlab and Easy Java Simulations Approach

The new information technologies provide great opportunities in control education. One of them is the use of remote control labs to teach the behavior of control systems through a network. In this paper, a new approach to create interactive networked control labs is described. Two main software tools are used: Matlab and Easy Java Simulations. The first one is a widely used tool in the control community, whereas the second one is an authoring tool, designed to build interactive applications in Java without special programming skills. The remote labs created by this approach give to students the opportunity to face the effects of network delays on the controlled system and also to specify on the fly their own control algorithm.