Remote laboratories - a cloud based model for teleoperation of real laboratories

Abstract

Remote Laboratories provide access to real experiments without time and location restrictions with necessary guidance required to perform experiments. Remote laboratories have emerged as an alternative to real laboratories and have shifted the past pedagogy fromfaculty-centric to student-centric approach. Over the past decade several remote laboratories have emerged in different parts of the world including those developed under Government of India's National Mission on Education through ICT as part of Right to Education (RTE) Program. Various approaches have been implemented to promote the use of remote laboratories in higher education. Technology to build remote laboratories has evolved considerably, there is still a growing concern regarding the multi-user scalability of these remote laboratories. Also, there is a need to incorporate innovative ideas such as collaboration of resources among universities within the remote laboratories framework. In this paper we propose a cloud based architecture for remote laboratories that provides scalability, more efficient use of resources, lower cost of ownership and shorter production time. Implementation of an Analog Communication lab, based on this architecture, has also been described. Advanced web technologies have been used to design an interactive user interface that makes teleoperation of high end instrumentation more convenient.