E-learning by remote laboratories: a new tool for control education

This paper deals with the Automatic Control Telelab (ACT), a remote laboratory of automatic control developed at University of Siena. In particular, it focuses on a new chapter of the ACT referred to as "student competition". It is a mechanism through which students can compete to design the controller with best performance for a given remote experiment. Controllers which achieve the given performance requirements are stored according to a ranking criteria. This tool allows students to make control synthesis practice on real remote processes through the Internet, and to compare their favourite controller with competitors designed by other users.