Comparative Experiences in Remote Automation Laboratories with Real Plants

In recent years, there has been a significant increase in remote learning courses. In some disciplines, including PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) automation, doing laboratory practice ‘at home’ with all the required material is difficult. In these cases, the possibility of doing laboratory practice remotely is of especial interest. We can use simulators to make an applet that simulates a PLC, but we discarded this because the students saw the practices as very artificial and unrealistic and hence their motivation decreased. In this paper, we describe how we have tried several possibilities of remote PLC programming and how their advantages and drawbacks have been analysed.