Distance practices in subjects of automatic control

This work aims at suitably combining hands-on and remote practices in the teaching of automatic control subjects. Virtual and Remote Laboratories in Automatic education have increasingly become a method utilized by universities in their efforts to offer greater schedule flexibility and operation of available resources. This paper discusses the implementation of remote experiments for Automatic Control through both the Distance Laboratory System (SLD), developed at the Universidad Central Marta Abreu de Las Villas, and AulaWeb, developed at the ETSI Industriales of Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. The SLD allows users (i) to learn and adjust predefined controllers, (ii) to design new controllers, and (iii) to test and analyze the performance of the predefined/designed controllers over a set of physical devices. The SLD uses MATLAB-Simulink for the distance laboratory, i.e. testing the predefined/designed controllers for practice and the Real Time Workshop Toolbox (RTW) as a real time kernel. AulaWeb is used as an aid for students and teachers of academic subjects. AulaWeb has been tested at several engineering schools and has been used by over 2000 students each year. This work shows the results using SLD and AulaWeb in Regulación Automática I of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. The distance and virtual practices, made in SLD, are combined with the question in AulaWeb to form Web self-assessment tools.