Online laboratories have been widely used in education, research, and industrial applications. For online laboratories, various architectures have been constructed to provide good user experience and powerful capabilities for online experimentation, in which the controller is a crucial part to connect the server with a controlled test rig.…

A smart campus provides students who are geographically scattered with online tools to get access to learning resources and laboratories. Although these remote laboratories have the potential and capabilities to implement different learning experiments, most of them are configured in a static fashion, being able to serve only one experiment for a…

In the ever-evolving landscape of technology, Industry 4.0 stands as a monumental revolution that intertwines man and machine, reshaping the dynamics of labor and work environments. This paradigm shift demands a new outlook and necessitates a fresh set of skills and competencies to navigate the intricate web of advancements. From engineers to…

3D-printing (3DP) is a rapidly evolving sector and is advancing at an unmatched pace. Integrating digital-based approaches to disseminate knowledge within institutional curricula is crucial for mainstreaming knowledge. This work explores the development of a virtual lab (VL) for additive manufacturing (AM), using an interactive VL simulator. The…

This study presents a monocular approach for capturing students' prototyping activities and interactions in digital-fabrication-based makerspaces. The proposed method uses images from a single camera and applies object reidentification, tracking, and depth estimation algorithms to track and uniquely label participants in the space, extracting both…

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) is a collection of technologies to bring the Internet to physically embedded devices and to embed them deeply into human activities to aid in a variety of activities. IoT gained traction with developers and consumers in recent years, driven by low-cost open-source hardware that enables easy prototyping and testing. IoT…

This article introduces a novel approach to remote laboratory instruction, specifically designed for teaching three-dimensional modeling using Blender software. The lab uses virtual machines to provide students with the necessary computational power to carry out the course activities, along with the correct version of the software. The flipped…

With the abrupt nationwide lockdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, many universities suspended face-to-face activities. Some of them decided to continue their academic courses, adapting traditional approaches to online learning. An important challenge was to deliver programming labs over the Internet without important methodological changes,…

In this paper, we propose a novel approach in hardware and software architecture design for implementation of remote laboratories for automatic control. In our contribution, we show the solution with flexible connectivity at back-end, providing features of multipurpose usage with different types of experimental devices, and fully configurable…

The use of practical laboratories is a key in engineering education in order to provide our students with the resources needed to acquire practical skills. This is specially true in the case of distance education, where no physical interactions between lecturers and students take place, so virtual or remote laboratories must be used. UNED has…

Laboratory work is critical in undergraduate engineering courses. It is used to integrate theory and practice. This demands that laboratory activities are synchronized with lectures to maximize their derivable learning outcomes, which are measurable through assessment. The typical high costs of the traditional engineering laboratory, which often…

Online laboratories have traditionally been split between virtual labs, with simulated components; and remote labs, with real components. The former tend to provide less realism but to be easily scalable and less expensive to maintain, while the latter are fully real but tend to require a higher maintenance effort and be more error-prone. This…

Designing and developing web-enabled remote laboratories for pedagogical purposes is not an easy task. Often, developers (generally, educators who know the subjects they teach but lack of the technical and programming skills required to build Internet-based educational applications) end up discarding the idea of exploring these new teaching and…

This paper reports on a state-of-the-art remote laboratory project called Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality (VISIR). VISIR allows wiring and measuring of electronic circuits remotely on a virtual workbench that replicates physical circuit breadboards. The wiring mechanism is developed by means of a relay switching matrix connected to a PCI…

Online laboratories are useful and valuable resources in high education, especially in engineering studies. This work presents a methodology to create effective laboratories for learning that interact with a Learning Management System (LMS) to achieve advanced integration. It is based on pedagogical aspects and considers not only the laboratory…