Martin Kalúz will give a seminar on "Multipurpose and Low-Cost Architectures for Automatic Control Remote Laboratories" on Wednesday, July 9, 2014 at 13:00 in room no. 641.

This seminar deals with the problems of design and realization of remote laboratories, while it is particularly focused on multipurposivness and reduction of development costs for such systems. Remote laboratory is an instrumentation apparatus with space-distribution of its functional parts and it allows to control experimental devices remotely, over the computer network. Such systems apply mostly in the area of technical education and they bring the innovative approach to practical exercising. 

The work is aimed on such concept of remote laboratory architectures, which allows to separate the phase of actual technological development from the process of implementation. This leads to significant savings in development time and reduces the complexity of laboratory creation process. To fulfill these requirements, the architecture has to be considered as universal since the early development phase. The universality must apply for both, the hardware resources as well as the software. Physical parts of architecture must be able to connect and serve a wide class of different experimental devices and program parts must be designed in order to mediate the remote control of such devices. 

For these purposes, two different architectures have been developed in this work. First one is the multipurpose hardware and software architecture, based on industrial-aimed control and communication devices, such as programmable logic controllers and industrial network routers. The main benefit of this architecture is that it provides a ready-made hardware and also partially software solution and it is capable to serve various types of technological processes. The second architecture uses low-cost parts, such as single-board computers and programmable micro-controllers. The purpose of this approach is to demonstrate the potential of cheap components for the use in remote laboratories and process control. The practical contribution of this work is the implementation of several different process control laboratories on both types of architecture. Another topic discussed in this work are the methods of laboratory management as well as their publication for educational purposes.