The Virtual Lab for controlling real experiments via Internet

The aim of the Virtual Lab project is to provide students access via the Internet to various experiments in control engineering, which are situated in control laboratories at several universities. Three German universities are currently developing the Virtual Lab as a network of remotely accessible laboratories in order to set up a prototype experimental environment. Students under consideration are usually located at geographically distributed location (e.g. at home) and have remote access to our experiments. The Virtual Lab is based on a distance education concept due to the fact that certain students (e.g. professionals) may be interested in studying even at places which are far away from campus eliminating the necessity to be there in person. In the Virtual Lab they are able to gain some practice in control theory at their convenience thereby saving travel time and cost. An approach based on a client/server architecture written in Java is proposed. This paper discusses the requirements of remote experimentation and presents the technical structure and first results of the project.