Development of a remote access control laboratory using xPC target and Virtual Reality Modeling Language

In this paper, we present the development of a remote access control laboratory at RMIT University which allows users to perform experiments on real hardware through the internet. The web based system consists of an internal server linked to an xPC Target real time machine which communicates with a DC Motor control module via relevant DAQ interfaces. In this set up, we attempt to replace the expensive setup of IP camera or video server by a realistic virtual reality model. This enhances the experiment's flexibility and reduces the cost of implementation while providing more interactive visualization and reality feeling of the real system to the users. In addition, the software also features with multiple login database system allowing students to observe or perform experiments under supervision remotely from the admin server.