A proposed architecture for remote mechatronics laboratory

Official URL: http://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b1063426 (Table of Contents)

Experimentation is a very important part of education in engineering. This is also true for mechatronics engineering which is a relatively new field, combining three engineering disciplines : mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and software engineering. The equipments needed for experiments in mechatronics are generally expensive. Examples are robot manipulators, mobile robots, electrical motors, fast DSP cards, CNC machines, etc. One solution for expensive equipments is sharing theavailable equipments with other universities around the world. This relatively newconcept, called "remote laboratory", is based on the computer communication technology and the internet. With the internet, sharing the available resources with theworld costs almost nothing. In this thesis a new architecture for a remote mechatronics laboratory is proposed. The proposed architecture is original in the sense that multipleusers can use multiple experiments at the same time. The system is flexible so that new experiments can be added quite easily. In order to reduce the overall cost and increase efficiency, multithreaded programming is proposed to reduce the number of computers necessary. For flexibility, communication is done using objects. Verification of thecommunication part is done implementing the DC motor control experiment, remotely.