Virtual Laboratory for Real-Time Control of Inverted Pendulum/Gantry Crane

A virtual laboratory is one of the techniques how to allow students of the distance learning gather experiences with the practical experiments. Several German universities are currently developing in the 'LearnNet' project, a network of remotely accesible virtual laboratories that will be shared by their students. We present our contribution to this project, a laboratory for inverted pendulum/gantry crane control. Through its development, several new components were used. This paper discusses the technical structure and utilization of the laboratory.