A virtual laboratory environment for real-time experiments

Abstract A virtual laboratory is a computing system that allows to share the physical resources available in a laboratory with remote users connected on the internet. This paper describes a particular virtual laboratory environment for running real-time robot control experiments over the internet through a standard web browser. Using the proposed approach, a remote user can connect to the virtual lab, run a control experiment on a physical robot device, change the control parameters. and interact with the real-time system to receive the desired state information. The robotic application considered in this paper is a ball balancer, a two-degrees-of-freedom rotating plate that has to be controlled to keep a ball in a desired location. Ball position and speed are detected by vision, through a fixed CCD camera.

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