Electro Standards Laboratories.

For companies who have had to trim lab facilities, or are too small to support in-house testing, Electro Standards Laboratories, Cranston, RI, has developed a collaborative testing and experimentation platform for electric motor and power systems that can be operated in real-time over the Internet using standard Web browsers. This service can be beneficial especially to designers of subsystems for hybrid vehicles and similar projects. This is not mere teleconferencing or a remote computer simulation, ESL points out: instead, this virtual engineering laboratory (VE-LAB) allows fully active control of actual system hardware. A command processor responds to incoming commands and updates local and remote graphical interface panels. At the local site, the GUI remote panel is supplied with real-time data graphs, process statistics, control buttons, and a real-time video link, allowing the user to monitor and control the experiment while receiving detailed data files for further analysis. As for time delay concerns, the VE-LAB system has been used in cross-country experiments through a common dialup line for Internet access, demonstrating delays of fewer than several seconds. A DSL or other high-speed line enhances performance.