Interactive control education with virtual presence on the Web

The recent technological advances in the Internet have enabled a multitude of applications to operate via the World Wide Web (WWW). One area that has been explored is the use of the WWW as a teaching medium. To this end various institutions are offering online courses which student from all over the world could subscribe to and attend. For a full review on this area as applied to control engineering, the reader is referred to the paper by Poindexter and Heck (1999). This paper describes a new technology that uses the web to teach feedback control interactively via the WWW. We describe a helicopter model located remotely with which a user can interactively modify a controller and evaluate performance using a web page. Furthermore, in order to visually observe system response in a dynamic fashion, a 3-DOF VRML model is animated using real data streaming back from the actual system.