Tele Experimentation: The Emerging Approach To Science And Engineering Lab Education

A project has been initiated to enable students and researchers to conduct Science and Engineering (S&E) experiments via the Internet as an answer to the dual needs for improved distance education in those fields as well as for more effective utilization of scarce research hardware resources, with the ultimate goal of having such experimentation become a ubiquitous component of distance education and research. The first step towards this objective consisted of implementing, as a prototype, a method whereby students studying Control Systems are able to conduct experiments on a small wind tunnel system located in the UTEP Controls laboratory while off-campus via the Internet using only Web browser software and to view (near) real-time data from that experiment the same way. Specifically, this allows the remote user to vary the PID controller gains and then monitor the effect of such variations on the dynamic response of the air velocity in the wind tunnel. The general approach and particular implementation, having now been established, can next be adapted to other S&E experimentation systems (for Biology, Chemistry, Physics and the various Engineering disciplines) on the UTEP campus and then elsewhere so as to result in a much broader impact, especially with the ongoing development of Internet 2. The intent is to eventually develop standardized (as much as possible) hardware and software platforms with generic modules for addressing various functions inherently needed by such experimentation systems, especially those used for instructional purposes.