A Virtual and Remote Control Laboratory in Moodle: The Ball and Beam System

This paper presents a web-based control laboratory for a ball and beam system that was adapted to be used within an online course of a Learning Management System platform. The experimentation web environment is presented in the context of the UNEDLabs project, a Spanish network of web-based laboratories for science and engineering education. LabView and data acquisition boards are used in the server-side for the remote laboratory application, Easy Java Simulations for the client-side interface of both the virtual and the remote laboratory, and Moodle for the web environment. The integration between the virtual and remote labs and Moodle is achieved thanks to the use of the EJSApp plugins. Recipients of the resulting application are graduate students who can use the advanced control techniques implemented in this web-lab: robust, fuzzy, and reset control.