Design and Implementation of Virtualized Control Systems Laboratory Experiments for Hybrid University Classes.

This work presents a virtual laboratory experiment for control systems design at ESPOL, an Ecuadorian polytechnic university. After the COVID-19 pandemic, hybrid classes (i.e., in-presence, and virtual students at the same time) are one of the alternatives for ESPOL courses including the Advanced Control class. In this sense, laboratory experiments that are part of the course are difficult to run for virtual students since they are not able to observe the dynamic behavior of experiments. For this purpose, the selected plant is a three interconnected tanks system, from which a dynamic model is derived including the computation of model parameters relying on simple physical metrics, such as ball valve rotation angles. The model is properly validated through comparison with real data. A graphical interface is designed to illustrate the PID control systems design through direct manipulation of the tuning parameters, resembling a process that is common in control engineering practice. Finally, results from a survey among students are presented, to illustrate the perception and effectiveness of the proposed experiment.