The desire to achieve even more ambitious goals, as well as the need for students to be able to carry out lab work at distance, using industrial automation equipment, gave rise to the creation of the LRAC of the Institute of Engineering of Porto (ISEP), School of Engineering of Polytechnic of Porto.
Through this new teaching method, more than 200 students have, since the first semester, access to the laboratories remotely as if they were in classrooms.
The LRAC, which is available 24 hours a day, allows the simulation, by remote control, of the existing equipment in the laboratories where practical classes usually take place.
Jorge Tavares, a researcher at ISEP, says that the platform "is also used to complement and enrich distance theoretical classes, with practical demonstrations in real-time, making online teaching more interesting and motivating".
"The space comes to life through industrial equipment, mostly from Siemens and Schneider, and various elements developed from scratch in the Department of Electrical Engineering, coming from various areas of electrical engineerings, such as microcontrollers, virtual private networks or traffic routing with Linux tools," adds the researcher.
According to ISEP, some exams will be performed using this tool. The project, which follows the vision of Industry 4.0, Robotics and Automation, intends to integrate several areas of electrical engineering.
