Rice Operates Remote Lab Over Web

Rice Operates Remote Lab Over Web
BY LIA UNRAU
Rice News Staff
Jan. 21, 1999

The toy helicopter whizzes around the laboratory, changing speed and direction. Prasanna Gandhi, a Rice graduate student, tests his finesse and understanding of dynamic systems theory by remote control. Very remote control.

The helicopter he is commanding is some 5,000 miles away, at a laboratory in Switzerland. Seated at a computer in a Rice lab, Gandhi can send commands and control information to various robots in Switzerland, watch real-time video of the robots responding to those commands, and gather data to later analyze the experiments.

In collaboration with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland, Rice is operating a remote laboratory system over the World Wide Web.

Led by Fathi Ghorbel, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science, the remote laboratory system at Rice is acting as a proving ground for the technology. Ghorbel uses the system in teaching MECH 420, Feedback Control of Dynamic Systems.

Although the technology is often discussed at teaching conferences around the country and internationally, Rice is among the few groups actually using the technology. Ghorbel chaired a breakout session at a National Science Foundation-sponsored meeting last fall called New Directions in Control Engineering Education.

“Nothing substitutes for the real thing,” Ghorbel says of laboratories, “but this provides an opportunity to interact with others and to practice on a variety of systems that might not otherwise be available.”

During a lecture on dynamics, control and robotics, for instance, a professor could use the remote system to demonstrate live, using experiments set up in a neighboring building, another university or another country. Students can use the remote robots to explore control systems and theory.

“The full potential of this idea,” Ghorbel says, “in addition to teaching, is research. Researchers could share facilities.”

Web robots could become economical research tools. Real-time remote access to systems makes it possible to share resources, use a complementary center, eliminate duplication of efforts, and to make highly technical, expensive lab equipment available that otherwise could be difficult or impossible to access.

NASA scientists used such a remote system to control the Pathfinder mission on Mars from around the world.

Back at Rice, among the Swiss robots Rice students can control are an inverted pendulum, an electrical drive system and the toy copter, a laboratory helicopter.

All three systems are used to illustrate basic concepts in control system theory and dynamical system theory and are directly related to concepts taught in the classroom, Ghorbel says. For example, the inverted pendulum is an example of a system with an unstable equilibrium. With a few careless commands, the pendulum swings wildly back and forth, while moving to the left and right in an attempt to balance itself. Students try different techniques to stabilize it.

The toy copter is an example of a nonlinear Multi-Input-Multi-Output (MIMO) system with strong couplings that presents challenges in nonlinear control theory. The electromechanical drive system has transmission attributes such as backlash, flexibility and friction that are present in industrial drives. Students can learn about these concepts in a simple laboratory system and get some training in their control, Ghorbel says.

And, it’s possible that companies manufacturing devices such as the electromechanical drive could use the educational lab as a remote testing site or for feedback on their product’s performance.

The initial program has been funded by the Brown Foundation through the Brown Teaching Grant Program, the Office of the Dean of Engineering, and the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science.

Ghorbel hopes to expand the program into a full-fledged Internet Remotely Operated Robotics and Control Systems Laboratory.

The next step is to allow students from the Swiss institute and around the world to experiment with equipment in Ghorbel’s lab. Soon to make its world debut on the Web: the challenging Spherical Rice Pendulum Apparatus (Rice SPENDULAP), currently housed in the Dynamic Systems and Control Laboratory of the mechanical engineering department.