Online autonomous guidance system for remote experiments in control engineering

The importance of laboratory experiments in control engineering education could never be overemphasized. Since the equipment and personnel resources are sometimes scarce, the so-called "remote lab " is developed in the last decade to provide every student the opportunity and freedom of experimentation. However, during the practice, it\´s found that students are in bad need of teachers\´ guidance when they doing remote experiments; but teachers could not be online all the time. In order to solve this dilemma, the concept of intelligent online autonomous guidance system is introduced and discussed in this short paper. And a simple demo system is also built within the WAVES (Web-based Audio/Video Education System) Lab of the University of Arizona to show the feasibility of this approach.