Real-Time On-demand Topological Verification Tool for Circuit Debugging in Remote Laboratory

High-speed internet communication envisages new possibilities which may alter the ways of the world. Virtualizing the pedagogy of education through Virtual classrooms is now well accepted. Remote Triggered Laboratories (RTL) are being explored as on-demand ‘Lab as a Service’. Laboratory education, which includes learning through scientific experiments and virtual intelligent tools, is crucial for students to comprehend and mastering experimental aspects of their theoretical studies. However, most virtual and remote labs lack runtime guidance tools akin to a physical teacher to assist students e.g. in wiring electronic circuits on a breadboard GUI. This offers a rich platform for the introduction of AI tools to complement human supervision. This paper reports our efforts in developing a novel ‘topological verification tool' (TVT) designed to identify wiring errors and provide real-time suggestions for correction. The intelligent TVT compares a student's designed circuit on a GUI breadboard with a stored wiring diagram displayed in electronic textbooks. It achieves this by comparing the incidence matrix extracted from the student's wired circuit with that of the stored circuit topology from textbooks. Upon comparison, the TVT highlights wiring errors or missing components and offers suggestions for necessary adjustments in the breadboard wiring. This paper details our experience in developing and integrating the TVT into our successfully deployed Remote Lab for electronics, ‘eVALIDATE,’ providing students with the experience of a virtual teacher aiding in runtime error correction. By enhancing the practical learning experience, the TVT ensures that students receive necessary ‘on-demand’ support to effectively master electronic circuit design, achieving the ‘supervised’ learning pedagogy even in a remote or virtual lab setting.