Hands-on experiences of undergraduate students in Automatics and Robotics using a virtual and remote laboratory

Automatics and Robotics subjects are always greatly improved when classroom teaching is supported by adequate laboratory courses and experiments following the "learning by doing" paradigm, which provides students a deep understanding of theoretical lessons. However, expensive equipment and limited time prevent teachers having sufficient educational platforms, and several low cost and flexible solutions have been developed to permit an effective teaching in Automatics and Robotics at a reasonable cost. Virtual and remote laboratories are inside this group of solutions as Web-based experimentation tools which have demonstrated the importance and effectiveness of hand-on experiences. This paper presents an experience teaching based on a blended-learning method using as experimentation tool a virtual and remote robotic laboratory called RobUALab, which is also described in the paper, in Automatics and Robotics subjects of the Computer Science degree at the University of Alicante. Students experiment with a set of hand-on exercises about Automatics and Robotics using RobUALab, firstly in face-to-face classes where they experiment in-situ with the real plant and, afterwards, they access to the experimentation environment in order to finish remotely their practical exercises outside the laboratory. The results obtained in the evaluation of the educational methodology proposed attest its efficiency in terms of learning degree and performance of the students. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.