Engineering End-to-End Remote Labs using IoT-based Retrofitting

TL;DR

This paper presents a low-cost, scalable, and portable IoT-based remote lab platform that supports live streaming and automation, enhancing accessibility and usability for educational experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel IoT retrofitting approach for remote labs with a scalable software architecture and automated experiment monitoring, addressing cost and scalability issues.

Findings

Low-cost IoT retrofitted hardware experiments

Positive student feedback on usability and learning

Qualitative evaluation shows high scalability and portability

Abstract

Remote labs are a groundbreaking development in the education industry, providing students with access to laboratory education anytime, anywhere. However, most remote labs are costly and difficult to scale, especially in developing countries. With this as a motivation, this paper proposes a new remote labs (RLabs) solution that includes two use case experiments: Vanishing Rod and Focal Length. The hardware experiments are built at a low-cost by retrofitting Internet of Things (IoT) components. They are also made portable by designing miniaturised and modular setups. The software architecture designed as part of the solution seamlessly supports the scalability of the experiments, offering compatibility with a wide range of hardware devices and IoT platforms. Additionally, it can live-stream remote experiments without needing dedicated server space for the stream. The software architecture also includes an automation suite that periodically checks the status of the experiments using computer vision (CV). RLabs is qualitatively evaluated against seven non-functional attributes - affordability, portability, scalability, compatibility, maintainability, usability, and universality. Finally, user feedback was collected from a group of students, and the scores indicate a positive response to the students' learning and the platform's usability.