Virtual and remote labs in control education: A survey

Virtual and remote labs have been around for almost twenty years and while they have been constantly gaining popularity since their appearance, there are still many people in the control education community who either do not know many details about them or do not know them at all. What are their benefits? Which examples of virtual and remote labs for control education can be found in the Internet and how spread and popular are they? What are the current trends and issues in the implementation and deployment of these tools? And the future ones? These and others are some of the questions we answer in this paper, trying to bring the attention of the control education community to these tools which, we believe, are meant to have an increasing importance and relevance for the 21st century students. (C) 2016 International Federation of Automatic Control. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.